Cleaning Up the Mess at Hanford

Hanford From Space
Google Earth

The last several weeks we’ve been talking and reading about nuclear waste storage in preparation for a forum Gallatin hosted in late September that included several different points of view on the Hanford cleanup, in my mind the country’s most important environmental project.

Gallatin has a special resource on nuclear waste, John Kotek, the new head of our Boise office.  For the previous two years, John was staff director for the President’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future where he worked with some top people who are struggling with the complexities of finding a place to store the high-level detritus of the country’s nuclear programs, nearly 70 years after they began.  John, a nuclear engineer, also brings the experience of administering the Federal Department of Energy contract for the programs of the Idaho National Laboratory.

The panel at the forum included our man Kotek as well as Jane Hedges, the Washington State Department of Ecology manager who runs the state’s nuclear waste program and represents the state’s interest at the Hanford cleanup site.  Our third expert was Ward Sproat, who came out of the civilian nuclear power industry in Pennsylvania and was appointed by President George W. Bush to oversee the license application for the proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.  Sproat is widely known within the industry to have turned that project around, though Yucca Mountain has since been taken off the table by President Obama at the urging of Harry Reid, Senator from Nevada and a staunch opponent.  Sproat has joined the Bechtel National team working on the Waste Treatment Plant at Hanford, which will stabilize nuclear waste and other contaminants there by fusing the waste into glass logs.

Single-wall tanks under construction, 1944
Department of Energy

We asked each panelist to give a status report from their unique point of view.  Hedges reported that the state sees considerable progress in Hanford cleanup.  She cited as a key risk-reducing accomplishment the fact that most of the liquids residing in the old single-wall waste storage tanks, have had their liquids pumped into newer, double-wall tanks.  What remains in the old tanks is a semi-solid, dry cake-like substance that contains a great deal of radioactivity but is far less likely to leak.  She pointed out, however, that the double-wall tanks are also getting older and recently a leak was detected in one of them – into the space between the two walls.

Cocooned C Reactor
Department of Energy

Hedges also said that the process of cocooning the plutonium producing reactors was continuing with six of the nine nuclear reactors sealed in cement and steel that will isolate the hot reactor core for up to 75 years.  Once sealed, the facilities are monitored remotely for heat and moisture. Every five years, workers enter the structure to evaluate its condition and to ensure there are no avenues for intrusion by animals or the elements. 

Making plutonium at Hanford was a messy process that required nuclear reactors to irradiate uranium fuel assemblies.  Some of the uranium in the fuel assemblies was converted to plutonium. The plutonium was separated from the uranium using a caustic chemical slurry that created a great deal of waste in the process.  The result is weapons-grade plutonium that is 93-94% pure and, when suddenly compressed inside a weapon, initiates a chain reaction explosion of considerable force. The bomb at Trinity, New Mexico was made with Hanford plutonium as was the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

During World War II and the Cold War that followed, many different reactors were constructed and several different extraction processes used.  The result creates huge technical challenges to clean-up because the character of the waste varied from process to process. 

Hedges said that the vitrification process that has been chosen for Hanford is the right technology, but because of the complexity of the waste, still faces technical challenges to the mission of incorporating waste into glass logs for permanent storage.  

Sproat said that the plant is now more than 60% complete.  The glass log technology has been successfully used in the US and in France, but the combination of the wastes and chemicals at Hanford, the different sizes of individual parts of the waste and other evolving information about the character of the waste make it difficult to complete design and finish construction of the vitrification plant.  Sproat’s company is involved in successfully decommissioning tanks and vitrifying the waste at the Savannah River complex in South Carolina, although the waste there is less complicated than the Hanford waste.

A third component of the discussion was what to do with the waste after it is processed.  For now, and for the foreseeable future, Kotek said high-level waste and commercial nuclear fuel rods will have to stay in place.  He said the Blue Ribbon Commission had come to the conclusion that a top down, federally mandated site solution would be riskier and more expensive and Kotek said that the commission was recommending a consent-based approach.  He said that recent successful public processes in Finland, Sweden and Spain led the commission to believe that there may be a better way to talk to communities about hosting nuclear waste storage.

Kotek said the Commission also recommended a change of governance for nuclear waste storage, from the federal Department of Energy to a new, single-purpose government corporation with responsibilities to “site, license, build, and operate facilities for the safe consolidated storage and final disposal of spent fuel and high-level nuclear waste at a reasonable cost and within a reasonable time frame.”

Legislation to accomplish this task has been introduced in the current session of the Congress and will spark a long-needed conversation about United States’ goals for its nuclear waste programs. We tend to think of Hanford as focused on turning highly radioactive waste into glass logs, but the cleanup is an enormous undertaking with many components and a cost of two billion dollars/year.

Hanford B Reactor, the First Plutonium Reactor
Department of Energy

Good and convenient sources allow the lay person to get a grasp on the history of waste at Hanford. In 2003, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory wrote a short history of waste at Hanford and set out just what kind of materials were put into the 1600 disposal sites that served nine nuclear power plants and five plutonium processing facilities. Used in tandem with the Department of Energy’s Hanford website, it is possible to update and enrich this remarkable history.

“From 1944 through the late 1980s, Hanford generated nearly 525 million gallons of high-level tank waste.  Liquid evaporation, discharge to the ground, chemical treatment and tank leakage reduced this volume by 90%— to 54 million gallons.  This is about 60% of the tank waste existing across all U.S. Department of Energy nuclear activities. Today, this waste contains about 195 million curies of radioactivity and 220,000 metric tons of chemicals,” the PNNL report says.

Hanford Tank Complex, About 1953

The report says that much of this waste, generated between 1944 and the late 1980s, is stored in 177 tanks on site of which 149 are single-shell tanks built between 1943 and 1964 with a useful life expectancy of 20 years.  Sixty-seven of these tanks have leaked or are suspected to have leaked one million gallons of liquid into the underlying sediment, beginning in 1956.  Here’s how the Department of Energy’s Hanford website describes how this waste got out and into the ground.  

“Even with 149 tanks, the volume of chemical wastes generated through the plutonium production mission far exceeded the capacity of the tanks. Some of the liquid waste did end up being put into holding facilities and some was poured into open trenches. Some of the wastes that were put into the tanks didn’t stay there, as the heat generated by the waste and the composition of the waste caused an estimated 67 of these tanks to leak some of their contents into the ground. Some of this liquid waste migrated through the ground and has reached the groundwater.”

With the shutdown of the N Reactor in 1987, no more plutonium has been made there.  Over the years the double-wall tanks have received liquids originally put into the single-wall tanks, providing better protection.   PNNL’s 2003 history reported that no double-wall tank had leaked, though some of those were reaching their design life.  As Jane Hedges reported during the panel discussion, a double-shell tank was recently found to have leaked into the space between the inner shell and the outer shell. 

Spent nuclear fuel was stored on site as well, about 2,100 tons.  The fuel was irradiated in the N Reactor, the dual-purpose reactor that produced plutonium for weapons and steam for electricity.  The fuel was then moved to two aging, water-filled concrete basins and never reprocessed, sitting in the water for years.  The report says that some of this fuel corroded and radionuclides migrated to the local soil and ground water. However, after 2003, that basin water was treated and disposed (Hanford cleanup treats 28,000,000 gallons of water each year) and the fuel assemblies have been taken out and stored in carbon steel tubes.  They reside today in what is called the “Canister Storage Building,” where it and Waste Treatment Plant steel canisters holding vitrified waste will be stored until a national repository is built.

There has also been some progress made in stabilizing the old single-wall tanks.  By the middle of last month, three single-wall waste tanks had been emptied this year, bringing the number of emptied tanks to ten.  Some contain small amounts of material that has hardened on the floors of the tanks and will require additional work before full decommissioning.

Low Level Nuclear Waste Disposal, Hanford 1950
Department of Energy

Best practices in the 1940s and 1950s were not as stringent as today’s.  Many wastes containing radioactive material were landfilled on site in those days.  A nine-acre burial site called 618-11 is one of those sites and clean-up us slated for about two years from now.  However, before moving dirt, a great deal of research must be done to learn what may have been disposed into the burial ground.  Complicating that research is that some of the records do not exist or appear contradictory.  In 1999, the PNNL history says the 9-acre 618-11 burial ground, located not far from the Energy Northwest commercial reactor complex, revealed groundwater samples with elevated levels of tritium—as much as 400 times above drinking water standards.

Handling radioactive materials creates radioactive garbage. Refrigerators, ovens, old clothing, shoes, pumps, equipment, vehicles, railroad cars – all the tools of long-ago experimentation and testing must be buried or put into containers for storage and future disposal. 

Plumes of radioactive and hazardous material are moving toward the Columbia River from land disposal and leaks.  Depending on the contaminants, some move slowly and others move with considerable speed.  The cleanup effort must monitor these plumes and manage their movement.

The PNNL history says that 110 million curies of radioactivity were discharged into the Columbia, a significant number, though a large percentage of the discharge was in elements with short half-lives.  Magnesium, for example, with a half-life of just over two and a half hours, accounts for two-thirds of the curies discharged into the river.   The history says that the largest releases into the Columbia occurred in 1963 when eight reactors were working and plutonium production was at its zenith.  In those days, a typical resident, according to PNNL, would receive one to five millirem/year over normal background radiation, a relatively small amount.  However, a frequent user of the Columbia who worked on the river and has a significant amount of fish in his diet would have experienced a 50-130 millirem dose, 15%-45% above background levels.  The PNNL study says that Native Americans exposed to those 1963 levels and who also consumed a lot of river fish would have been exposed to fifty times more radiation than exists in the natural background.  Today, none of the reactors built for plutonium production are working and two-thirds are cocooned and none of the plutonium reprocessing plants are operating.  Called canyons, because of their length and high walls, these plants remain shut down but still are highly radioactive.

A Hanford cleanup agreement between the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency and the State of Washington Department of Ecology was agreed to in 1989 with the leadership of then Attorney General Chris Gregoire and was updated in 2009 with a court-supervised consent decree.  The agreement covers many different disposal sites across the reservation.  Most of these materials will have to remain on site until a national nuclear waste repository is found, studied, approved, permitted and built. 

The clean-up at Hanford is a legacy issue, depending on stable funding over many years – the current schedule calls for continued intense efforts along many fronts.  Not all of these fronts have a secure end-date.  Also, future funding for Hanford cleanup and for a new, national repository to store what is removed at Hanford depends on the congressional appropriations process, even though commercial nuclear plants set aside today some $750 million a year for a national repository.  This money is considered revenue by the federal government and is not, as originally contemplated, a fund of its own.  Getting the money requires the appropriations process.  Making funding even more difficult is the fact that the federal government is completing some of its cleanups in other parts of the country.  Twenty-nine states were part of America’s nuclear program and needed various levels of cleanup.  Today, however, 15 of those have moved from cleanup to monitoring, making the issue less urgent to Congressional delegations in those states where the cleanup is finished. 

Seventy years ago, in December 1942, a group of scientists toured the Hanford Site, one of a handful of sites under consideration for the world’s first plutonium factory.  They knew that the science of nuclear energy was widely shared among scientists and academics around the world before World War II and that the Nazis both knew about the atom’s potential as a weapon and had demonstrated great innovation and success making new weapons.  They knew that in December 1942, the Germans appeared to be in command at Stalingrad, owned nearly all of Europe and the Mediterranean Sea and were raining bombs on London.   The scientists were in a hurry to produce an American atomic weapon and left us a shorter war and highly contaminated place in the center of our state next to our great river.

Under the best of circumstances, cleanup will be ongoing well into the middle of this century with the areas under active cleanup becoming smaller and concentrated toward the center of the site, away from the river.  In a way, it is a kind of cathedral.  People working on it today will never see it finished, though it is one of the most significant public works our country will ever do.  It creates amazing and difficult management problems that require a focus on tomorrow’s end game while solving today’s immediate and difficult problems. 

Department of Ecology Waste Program Website 

Short History of Hanford Project

Department of Energy Hanford Cleanup Website

Vitrification Plant Summary

I'll Never Fall in Love Again

Why is it that just when you have put the Internet in its place as an exploitive, crass and dangerous landscape, something comes along that makes you start humming "I'll Never Fall in Love Again?" 

Three women are trying to keep the dog from our prosciutto and crab as they walk by on a barely discernable trail that skirts the pile of logs we had stopped at in the middle of the Skagit Delta on a luminescent afternoon.  The creature we now know as Sofia is nearly knocking over our just-opened bottle of expensive Sancerre as she jumps on top of one log and leaps into a stand of grass after a bit of bread we threw for her. 

This was hardly the place where you'd expect random company.  We were in the middle of a perfectly flat estuary, save for the dyke 1000 yards behind us and Hat Island, another thousand yards in front of us where a brackish Puget Sound, at slack tide, slopped along the edges of Skagit County and our picnic.

Now, they were returning.  "May we enter your, uh, uh, space?  I think it is in that log," said the oldest of the three, consulting a hand-held GPS device or a very smart phone. 

"Sure," we said, "though we'd like to be let in on the 'it' part."

"Oh, we're Geocachers," she said as the younger ones checked their GPS and honed in on one of the logs.  Soon she was reaching into a broken section of the log up to her shoulder and retrieving a small plastic container that contained a notepad, a small plastic figure of a man in shorts, a pencil and a few other items.  Soon those contents were joined by the cork of the Sancerre bottle with our names written on it, or, as the Cachers would say, 'the names of four Muggles encountered at the very end of the mission.'

The first cache was a black pail containing books, software, videos and a slingshot, hidden in the woods near Beavercreek, Oregon in spring of 2000 and posted on a GPS enthusiast site.  Two days later, it had its first visitor.  Today, four million people are in search of 1.4 million geocaches world-wide.

As we spoke further with our new friends, we sensed the richness of their community, the basic enchantments of finding and sharing, a good day of travel and exercise, the array of information as they went home and posted their happy day. 

Cache sites in western Washington

For us, as we finished our second bottle, a nice little pinkie boy, we had that same feeling when we wrote 'symptoms of pneumonia' into this weird little site called Google and suddenly saw the world come roaring into our kitchen. 

Here's another one that stirs my heart. 

Driving back to work from lunch in Columbia City, I followed the Lake Washington shore to pass through my old neighborhood, Leschi.  As I pulled a bit further to the right to avoid a careless car in the on-coming lane, I noticed I was disturbingly close to a monster tree encroaching on Lake Washington Boulevard.  After I pulled over and checked it out, it was clearly a Redwood and it was truly a big one.  As I stood beside it, I imagined the war that would break out if the Seattle Transportation Department decided it was too big a hazard and would have to come down. I saw myself in my sleeping bag, surrounded by other Defenders of the Sequoia, waiting for the people who would do harm.

This had to be a famous tree, I thought, which is exactly what I entered in Google, along with the phrase, 'in Seattle.'  There appears then a fantastic website built and maintained by Arthur Lee Jacobson, and an article he had written with someone named Jerry Clark called "Pioneering Seattle's Historic Trees."  A 1989 gift to the state on its centennial, that article and many other subsequent pieces, tell us everything we would like to know about our city's lovely trees, and, incidentally, which to mourn. 

I went to 'Contact' and wrote Mr.  Jacobson about my experience with the tree and asked if he knew anything about it.  A couple of hours later, this was his reply:

Subject:  Re:  Leschi Tree

"It is a Coast Redwood, Sequoia sempervirens, and presumably planted at the time of the early boulevard landscaping some 100+ years ago.  About seven years ago it was 153 feet tall; now it is doubtless more than 160."

Arthur Lee Jacobson's site is the epitome of the 'long tail' of the Internet, that part of the space to the right of global media and global figures, ubiquitous products, popular and mainline interests.  While the left part of the metaphor may attract more eyeballs, the right side contains a variety of content and ideas that, while perhaps producing fewer hits, stimulates remarkable and sometimes beautiful content -- and, importantly it is usually more interactive.  You can, for example, join Arthur Lee Jacobson on a tree tour of a specific neighborhood or park.  Cost? Ten bucks.  When was the last time Justin Timberlake did anything for ten bucks?

So why were they landscaping along Lake Washington a hundred years ago, and why with a Sequoia sempervirens?  The answer is in Seattle's incredible desire to change the landforms that its citizens originally found.  Famously, it removed a very significant hill from North of the downtown core and put it out in Elliott Bay to create Harbor Island, the center of the Port of Seattle and for seventy years or so the largest man made island in the world.

Museum of History and Industry

Describing that landscape separates older Seattle people from younger ones.  The ones who saw the neighborhood get hip and house many thousands call it Belltown, after an original developer, Austin Bell.  The ones who watched the hill come down and be replaced by automobile dealer parking lots call it The Denny Regrade.

Among all the filling, shaping, sluicing and digging Seattle leaders loved, the canal project that connected Lake Washington to Lake Union and ultimately to Puget Sound had another powerful effect on the original landscape.  It lowered Lake Washington's water level nearly 9 feet.  This created a startling amount of land, most of it public.  The great parks developers of the time, the Olmsted brothers, had a hand in crafting what the new natural environment along the lake would look like.  Along their boulevard, Lake Washington Boulevard, they may have placed the occasional Sequoia, for its uniquely western look and notable size.

Meandering down to a narrowing region of the long tail to read more about the Lake Washington shore, I found artist Ellen Sollod and a beautiful and personal piece of research she did called "Lake Washington Palimpsest." 

Copyright Ellen Sollod
Ellen Sollod Studio

The term means something like replacing old writing with new -- by erasing or covering up -- it's a Greek word meaning scraped and cleaned off.  She applies this idea to Lake Washington and tries to find parts of the once prominent old shapes that were erased by the physical changes of its restless citizens.
It is a uniquely personal piece of work.  She's not sitting in front of a computer, but fundamentally in front of whatever she sees and reports.  She carries a pin hole camera and a bucket with chemicals to develop the images.  She goes to buildings housing records and maps, walks in, talks to someone -- say at the Corps of Engineers -- and asks to look at what they have about the lake.

Trying to find the Black River, the stream that originally fed Lake Washington before the change of elevation made it disappear, she walks into a scary trailer park near a swamp and identifies what is left of the Black River, an oozy swerve at the bottom of a ditch.

She is an artist whose history speaks with an earnest heart, one that captured mine.



  Geocaching website
Arthur Lee Jacobson's Website
Ellen Sollod's Lovely History of Lake Washington
HistoryLink: Ravenna Park Trees Cut Down By Parks Department, 1920
Lyrics to "I'll Never Fall in Love Again" and Ringtone

Garbage Out

Twenty years ago, solid waste disposal in Washington state changed significantly when most communities purchased long term contracts for disposal from two fiercely competing companies that took the garbage by train to rural eastern Washington and Oregon.  Today, another garbage war is about to break out with more companies, less local ownership and some big questions for local governments hosting the landfills. 

The change was mostly good.  Pushed by the Resource Conservation and Recovery Acts of 1976 and 1992, local governments and the private sector created new, safer landfills and higher recycling rates.  They closed down and capped old leaky landfills on the wet, west side of the state in favor of new, highly engineered sites in the drier east side in a policy that provided significant environmental value. 

The timing was right politically as well.  Governor Christine Gregoire was ending her time as Director of the Department of Ecology and had participated in the formulation of the new laws and understood their implications and values. Her move to the Attorney General's office put her in a unique position to further the legal changes necessary to replace the old landfills and open big, well-lined landfills with collection and treatment of leachate and methane gas. 

Statistics from the 1999 Department of Ecology Annual Solid Waste Report show how, in just a few years, significant change happened to landfills taking household and commercial solid waste.

Ownership  Landfills           Waste (Tons)              % of Total
               1991 1998         1991              1998        1991   1998
Private        9      6      1,200,000     2,800,000        31      61
Public        36    16      2,700,000     1,780,000        69      39



Washington state Department of Ecology

Not only did the new legislation increase the private company role in waste disposal, it stirred the consolidation of the solid waste industry as giants like Waste Management first purchased local and regional companies and then their national and international competitors.

Rabanco, a company owned by the storied Razore family, was the clear winner against the giant Waste Management in Garbage War I, circa 1989-1995.  During that time, more than 20 municipal contracts in Washington state were let and Rabanco took nearly all of them, the only large exception was Seattle along with a couple of smaller municipals.  Publicly-owned Waste Management was playing to investors and its internal financial rules.  Rabanco's culture was simpler -- win.

After the contract fights were settled, consolidation in Washington state picked up steam.  The regional heirloom, Rabanco, was plucked by Allied Waste Industries in 1998 and, in 1999, Allied purchased the US assets of Browning Ferris, another long time solid waste brand.  Rabanco's Roosevelt Regional Landfill was very good to Rabanco and costly to Allied.  Before Roosevelt was operational, in 1990, Rabanco was valued at about $50 million.  Allied bought it eight years later for $400 million. 

In 2008, Allied itself was eaten by Florida's Republic Services, though the deal is characterized locally as a merger because of Republic's efforts to avoid contract rights held by Klickitat County, which hosts the Roosevelt Regional Landfill.  It's one of several indicators of a less than effective partnership.



Ron Mittelstaedt
California Polytechnic Institute

In the mid-nineties, an energetic Browning Ferris employee named Ron Mittelstaedt heard that the company was selling its assets in Oregon and Idaho and he organized a team and found money to buy them.  They included a weak competitor from Garbage War I, Finley Buttes Landfill, that served Clark County and a handful of other, smaller customers.  Waste Connections earned $13 million in his first year, 1997.  Quarterly revenue in first quarter 2011 was $333 million. 

Mittelstaedt then acquired a group of companies, in and around Tacoma and Pierce County that had been able to site a landfill in the eastern part of the county.  Pierce County had long resisted waste-by-rail because it wanted complete local control, though a handshake deal between Warren Razore and Harold LeMay, the principal partner in Murrey Collection and Land Resources Inc., sent some of Pierce County's garbage to Klickitat County. 


LeMay Museum

Harold's successful company, even before he sold it, allowed him to amass the largest collection of antique cars in the world and break ground on Tacoma's next attraction, America's Car Museum, which will put Tacoma's vaunted Museum of Glass to great shame. 

Two other landfills have the capability to compete for large, regional contracts that will come in Garbage War II -- Coffin Butte near Corvallis (Republic/Allied) and Simco Road in Mountain Home, Idaho (Idaho Waste Systems).  

So, the competitive atmosphere is way different today.  Five, arguably, six landfills have the capacity to take any waste stream generated in Washington state. Only one of them with the capacity and the will, Roosevelt Regional Landfill, operates in Washington state. The region is significantly over-capacity, and the fact that Seattle quietly extended its deal with Waste Management and its Columbia Ridge Landfill until 2028 means that there are just two markets with major league waste streams, Snohomish County and King County.   

King County has managed the million tons a year that go to its Cedar Hills landfill intensively, extending the landfill's life by several years.  However, the string is running out and its garbage will shortly start moving to the waste-by-rail system.  It has considered what it calls conversion technologies, a euphemism for burning garbage, but the cost of burning solid waste exceeds rail-served landfilling by $15-$30 dollars a ton and siting a burner is traditionally associated with great peril, if not low sperm counts in nearby men.   

Soon, King County plans to start rail hauling with about a tenth of its waste, 100,000 tons/year.  It labels this as an "experiment."  The bidding for that amount will be furious, with the expectation that subsequent King County contributions to the waste by rail system will naturally flow to the early winner.

The strongest competitor in the market is Waste Connections' Mittelstaedt.  He has been aggressive just as the Rabanco successors have been passive and out-maneuvered.  The acquisition of the LRI properties by Mittelstaedt gives him a tremendous logistical upside in west central counties like Thurston, Mason and Lewis.  In addition, he is benefitting from the deal offered by Pierce County to the local garbage handler LeMay.  The contract is about $5 dollars above market.  The LeMay assets were purchased just after the Pierce County contract was signed, so, Pierce County taxpayers are subsidizing Mittelstaedt's efforts elsewhere in the state, a nifty advantage.

Snohomish County, another big generator currently going to Allied/Republic's Roosevelt site, has its contract coming due.  Republic will try to extend the contract there, but extension comes with a cost, likely something like a price reduction of $5/ton, about what Waste Management accepted when Seattle extended its contract to 2028.  If Mittelstaedt is as aggressive now as he has been, he will go after both Snohomish and King County as hard as he knows. 

The big loser in this ploy is Klickitat County, home of Roosevelt Regional Landfill.  Each ton of garbage is worth about $3 bucks to the county and it has been getting about $8,000,000/year from these host county fees, about 20% or its total budget.  An ominous indicator of the Allied partnership with Klickitat County is the disappearance next year of 100,000 tons/year that stemmed from the Razore/LeMay handshake.  Allied never told Klickitat County it had raised no objections to the Pierce County contract provision that directed the tonnage would go to Waste Connections after 2012 and failed to mention the whole thing to the county.  That move cost Klickitat County $300,000/year.

If Allied/Republic loses out on King County and other waste streams now going to Klickitat County, the county's revenues will suffer considerable decline.  Replacement tonnage could come from special waste streams -- petroleum contaminated soils, dredge spoils, environmental clean-ups -- but Allied/Republic has not demonstrated the creativity it needs to compete in that sphere.  So, Allied/Republic is at risk of being second tier in the Northwest after it so recently entered the market.  

The company's only anchor waste stream is the solid waste that comes from Snohomish County.  If Allied/Republic can't compete in King County, and if Waste Connections decides to aggressively compete in Snohomish County and the many other counties that are part of the Razore legacy, then Klickitat County will be raising taxes as quickly as it lowered them when their landfill business started to cook in the early 90s.  It is quite possible that the industrious Mr.  Mittelstaedt will be surveying a Northwest landscape that is, for the most part, all his.

The Earthquake That Wouldn't Stay Put

It all started with the Hydro-Thermal program, a very big 1950s idea that ultimately crashed very hard in the 1980s with the largest municipal bond failure in the history of the country.  The big idea was that the Northwest electrical need was growing quickly and the Columbia River was all dammed up and our electrical growth would soon outpace our ability to make enough of it.  So, to save the aluminum industry, to serve customers whose demand, according to the forecasters, would triple in the 20 years between 1970 and 1990, the engineers driving the power system proposed building more than 20 nuclear and coal plants along with 20 or so new dams. 

We'll return to Hydro-Thermal one day, but this story is about an unintended consequence of it – the demand for seismic knowledge in the Northwest that went through the roof as project sponsors sought to license new facilities throughout the region.   It was a great season to be an earthquake guy.  Better yet, we are safer today because of the sophisticated knowledge of our seismic character kicked off by this gold rush for new electrons.

Monte Dolack Poster used in campaign
to stop Skagit nuclear plants.

Building a nuclear power plant requires an analysis of the biggest earthquake in the past that might affect the structural capabilities of a plant in the future.  With potential sites scattered all around the region, one engineering company’s placement of the epicenter of an event became an increased risk to other engineering companies and their plant-building clients.  That’s what happened to the earthquake of 1872, likely the biggest earthquake in the interior of the state of Washington.

Our story starts with Puget Sound Power and Light, today's Puget Sound Energy, working against considerable local opposition to build two nuclear plants near Burlington in Skagit County. 

Conventional wisdom, and a Canadian seismologist named W. G. Milne, had the epicenter of the 1872 quake about a hundred miles east of Vancouver, near Hope, on the west side of the mountains and uncomfortably close to Puget’s project. 

Puget's seismic consultant, Bechtel, countered with a report that featured the big slide at Entiat, the one, they said, that blocked the Columbia River on the night of December 14, 1872.  There was native oral tradition of such a slide and the engineers knew that only a big shocker like '72 could cause such a signal event.  There was also a pattern of aftershocks that pointed to the Ribbon Cliffs epicenter, at a place called Earthquake Point.

That was all very compelling unless you happened to be the Washington Public Power Supply System and you were building a clutch of nuclear plants near Richland.  Suddenly, the big earthquake that was 300 hundred miles away and across the Cascade Mountain Range was located just 120 miles distant up State Highway 97. 

In 1872, people had no technology to measure the intensity of an earthquake.  In fact, a measure of our pre-Hydro-Thermal seismic maturity is that there were just three seismographs in Washington and three in British Columbia as late as 1969.   The Pacific Northwest Seismic Network has a different story today, thanks, in part, to our Hydro-Thermal friends.

We understand an earthquake that happened long ago by using one of the oldest technologies available to us, the observations of people describing what they see, hear and feel.  The tool is called the Modified Mercalli Scale and it has a twelve level description of an event, starting with something that might be felt on the second story of a wood frame building (II), to something that feels like a passing truck, or maybe some dishes rattle (IV), to something felt by everyone inside and outside the house with people unsteady on their feet, scared, with pictures falling off walls (VI).  (USGS Description)

Seismic monitoring today

These felt events are researched and plotted throughout the region, using newspaper accounts, diaries and oral communications. Many are related by the person who experienced it but also sometimes recounted second, even third hand.  There were few people in the parts of the Northwest that harbored the epicenter of 1872, but its effects were felt over the entire Northwest.  One man in Olympia, a steamboat captain named Lawson, had a watch perched on his vest pocket and looked at it when he felt the first bump:

"Shock occurred precisely at 9h.40 1/2m P.M.  It commenced with a light movement, gradually increasing for 18-20 seconds.  Then came the heavy shock, lasting four or five seconds; then it gradually decreased.  In six minutes after the first shock there was another, followed by two others one minute apart."

For every seasoned observer like Lawson, there was a man like Mr. McBride, a rancher, who with a partner had a spread three miles from the mouth of the Wenatchee River.  Their narrative was reported by the Portland Herald, many weeks after the event:

"They immediately sprang from their couch and were about donning their clothes when they were thrown to the floor in a rather sudden manner ... He turned to his partner and hastily informed him of his options, advising that they should leave." 

The more McBride observed, the greater the saga.  Soon, mountains were collapsing about him, rivers rose several feet in a few minutes and a great noise in the mountains, like the "simultaneous discharge of artillery," rattled the night. 

Research on McBride also showed that he was awaiting trial in Yakima at the time of the earthquake and had several convictions in his past.  He was convicted of selling liquor to the Indians after the earthquake, put in jail in Yakima, but broke out and fled to Canada.  Whatever his veracity as a witness, researchers apparently believed he had been thrown off his feet, a characteristic of a Modified Mercalli VIII, which they set as the intensity at Wenatchee.  

Soon after Bechtel's report, a team of scientists representing the WPPSS nuclear project began picking away at the theory that the landslide at Ribbon Cliffs occurred at the same time as the earthquake. 

They presented evidence based upon ash falls from two different St.  Helen's eruptions that the slide could have occurred as much as 100 years before the 1872 quake or, within a 14 year band before and after 1872.   In addition, they asserted that the real cause of the slide was not the earthquake but erosion at the foot of the cliff.

A Native American named Wapato John reported in 1891, 19 years after the quake, that he remembers the river filling up for hours after a big slide which he attributed to the earthquake. Notwithstanding Mr.  John, the new work done on the slide cause was helpful to the arguments of UW seismologists Malone and Bor who, in 1979, moved the epicenter west again, across the Cascades, near Ross Lake, 50 miles North of Puget's project.

Enter University of Washington Professor Howard A.  Coombs.  Coombs was the emeritus Chair of the University of Washington's Geology Department and possessed vast experience working on many of the Columbia River dams as well as in Japan, where he served as the geological advisor to the Supreme Allied Commander, Douglas MacArthur.  He had just closed out his service as head of a special panel investigating the causes of the Tieton Dam disaster when he was asked once more to lead a panel of experts, this time to figure out where the 1872 earthquake was centered.

It was an artful settlement, described by Eric S.  Cheney, Emeritus Professor of the UW College of the Environment, as: 

"The utilities subsequently convened a 'blue ribbon panel' that placed the epicenter between Earthquake Point (Ribbon Cliffs) and Hope -- east of the crest but sufficiently distant from Hanford."

Just one of the nuclear plants remain, but the fascination with 1872 remains.  A group of USGS scientists had another crack at the earthquake in 2001.  They moved it north and a bit and east, about 20 miles from Entiat at the south end of the lake, near the city of Chelan.  There it slumbers, trembling, until the Chelan Chamber of Commerce hires its own geologist.

Note: 

As always happens when doing research, you find a couple of gems. 

First, there is UW Professor Eric S.  Cheney's Northwest Geological Society's Field Trip Guide Book #24 called "Floods, Flows, Faults, Glaciers, Gold and Dneisses, From Quincy to Chelan to Wenatchee."  It's a gem that will allow you to follow specific roads and road miles to some of the geologic miracles that he describes.  It's loaded up on my hand held for my next trip east.  (Cheney's Field Trip)

Second, there is the General Accounting Office June, 1967 report on the Hydro-Thermal Project.  It is an amazing documentation of the thinking at the time and how wildly off the electrical industry was and how much it has improved forecasting techniques.  (1967 GAO Report on Hydro-Thermal)

How long will it take to clean up the Chernobyl mess and put it away?

The images of the nuclear power plants in Japan keep taking me back to Chernobyl.

This month is the 25th anniversary of the steam explosion at Chernobyl early in the morning of April 26, 1986.  As the problems in Japan get worse, I wonder what will happen when CNN and the world go away, the Tokyo Electric Power Company is nationalized and we turn this over to the engineers and technocrats in Japan and in the world community.

The only real example we have is Chernobyl and a review of what has been done over the past twenty five years offers a grim picture of the years to come in Japan. 

As part of the emergency response, the Soviet government hastily completed, in October of 1986, a steel and concrete structure that entombed the still hot pile.  The pile contained 200 tons of material and close to a ton of radio-nuclides, unstable elements which emit powerful gamma rays for a long time.  Most of the radio-nuclides at Chernobyl are plutonium, among the most dangerous materials that exist.   Part of the Chernobyl plant’s mission was to supply the Soviet military with plutonium for nuclear weapons.

Around these materials are a crumbling sarcophagus, a legacy of abandoned communities, relentless expense, technical failure, amazing politics and a numbing inertia.   My last post talked about Chernobyl’s heroism.  This story is about the decades-long effort of trying to pick up Chernobyl and put it away.

According to the European Bank for Social Development, the administrator of a fund for stabilizing the Chernobyl site, the government of Ukraine, where the plant was located, was spending up to 5% of its Gross Domestic Product in the year 2000, 14 years after the incident, on the social, health and environmental consequences of the explosion.  Next door neighbor Belarus, down wind, was spending even an even higher percentage of its wealth.

People

The plant operators' town of Pripyat, population 45,000, closed the day after the accident and people were evacuated.  By the middle of May, a zone 18 miles wide was established that would relocate 116,000 people.  In subsequent years, another 220,000 people were relocated and the exclusion zone extended from 1680 square miles to 2600.  

In January, 2008, the Ukraine government announced a decommissioning plan that includes repopulating some of the contaminated areas.  The government sees the regional economy as driven by agriculture and forestry.  Initial infrastructure requirements will mean the refurbishment of gas, potable water and power systems.  The burning of local wood will be banned and the eating of some wild foods, like mushrooms, strongly discouraged.

More than 21,000 homes would be connected to gas networks in the period 2011-2015 while another 5600 contaminated or broken down buildings are demolished. Over 1300 kilometres of road and ten new sewage works and 15 pumping stations are planned. The feasibility of agriculture will be examined in areas where the presence of caesium-137 and strontium-90 is low, "to acquire new knowledge in the fields of radiobiology and radioecology in order to clarify the principles of safe life in the contaminated territories," says the report.

The World Health Organization has estimated that 1,000 people suffered substantial radiation exposure and 4,000 people will eventually die as a result of cancers, mainly thyroid, caused by fallout, about the same number of people who die annually in China mining coal.  Many people dispute the WHO estimates and the Internet is alive with a much more massive Chernobyl tragedy.

The Site

In the mid-90s, the international community began to pressure Ukraine to shut the three remaining units in the complex because of design flaws with the plants and concerns about the stability of the sarcophagus surrounding Unit Four.   But closing the plants was a tough sell as they created half the electricity for the country.  After the fall of the Soviet Union, a series of disputes with Russia over natural gas made it difficult to pursue natural gas plants as replacement power.  Ukraine would build three new pressurized water reactors after its Independence.

Meantime, the RBMK (reaktor bolshoy moshchnosty kanalny) or high-power channel reactor, went through numerous upgrades of its safety technologies though the design still lacks a containment vessel, the part of the plant that saved the day at Three Mile Island.  Today, 11 RBMK reactors are operating, all within the former Soviet Union.  If current schedules are kept, the last four will be decommissioned in the 2020-2025 time frame.

As part of the negotiation, the international community committed to the decommissioning of the remaining reactors.  That means stabilizing and storing the fuel rods of the now closed reactors, which have been sitting in their spent fuel pools for the better part of 15 years.   The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, working with money donated by several counties will supervise the decommissioning.

The rods are currently in water and other “wet” storage facilities, but will now be stored in dry cement casks, a technique called Dry Cask Storage.  The fuel rod assemblies will be dried and disassembled before being put in the closed casks.  Sixteen donors have contributed 320 million Euros specifically to this end.  The contract to actually build and accomplish this task was signed last month.  That’s right.  Last month.

It was supposed to be done much earlier, but a contract let in 1999 to process the 25,000 fuel assemblies in the Chernobyl complex was cancelled in 2007 because technical difficulties emerged.  Nearly all of the structures for this task were complete at the time of cancellation.  The new contract calls for an interim spent fuel facility to be completed in 2014 with permanent facilities coming later.

If all goes well, the threat of Chernobyl to the world will be nearly over by 2017, though several activities will go on for the next 100-300 years.  The vehicles for this accomplishment are called, in Europeonese, The New Self Confinement, which permanently entombs the remains of Plant Four and the Spent Fuel Storage Facility, the site where the spent fuel rods will be safely quarantined and where the structures will be disassembled and/or processed.

The remainder of the Chernobyl Safety Fund – nearly 700 million Euros – will turn the entire complex into an environmentally safe site.  It will prevent water from intruding and dust, contaminated with Cesium, from dispersing.  It will deconstruct the existing structure which will be laid down within the site or processed inside the New Safe Confinement. 

The design contract was signed in 2007 and the driving of the pilings for the foundations of the two 50 ton capacity cranes started in 2010.  Construction will start in 2012 and the facility will operate for 100 years.