Nature’s Nuclear Surprise

Nine years after the last reactor shut down at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, there are 14 million gallons of deadly wastes buried in Hanford’s sandy belly. Chromium and strontium are leaking into the Columbia River. Particles of radioactive Iodine-131 (eight times the amount released in the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island) blew up Hanford’s smokestacks, settling like an invisible rain on the wheat-colored grass and shrubs of southeastern Washington.

How deadly was the result?

An estimated 2 million people in Washington, Oregon and Idaho were exposed to Hanford radiation from 1944 to 1972. Current studies are attempting to measure possible links to thyroid disease and leukemia, among a range of health problems reported in the farmlands and river towns that were one epicenter for the atomic age.

But a recent government attempt to catalog effects on wildlife in the region has revealed an astonishing byproduct of the nuclear age: The most poisonous place in America has yielded a pristine stretch of native grasslands and wild river that, far from being a nuclear wasteland, is one of the healthiest ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest.

The 51 miles of river flowing through the Hanford Reach--protected from the hydropower dams, dredging, shoreline logging, grazing and farming that have threatened wildlife all along the course of the Columbia--is teeming with salmon, producing 80% of the fall Chinook spawned in a region where salmon populations are plummeting toward extinction.

Hanford’s range lands, fenced off with warning signs and security gates, contain some of the last large, healthy tracts of the classic shrub-steppe habitat that once blanketed eastern Washington, Oregon and southern Idaho. Ducks, egrets, blue herons, hawks, quail, pheasants and meadow larks dart along the river--205 bird species in all, 31 of them endangered or threatened elsewhere.

A herd of 300 elk roams the arid ranges. Deer forage along the banks. More than 100 populations of 15 endangered or threatened plant species were cataloged in the survey, conducted by the Department of Energy and the Nature Conservancy. It identified three new plant species and 18 previously unknown insects. Hanford has become “an irreplaceable natural legacy,” the survey said.

‘Pretty Amazing’

“It’s really incredible. To think of the toxicity of some of the stuff out there, and the fact that it can exist side-by-side with all this diversity, is pretty amazing,” said Laura Smith, director of conservation programs for the Nature Conservancy in Seattle.

Now, as the Energy Department proceeds with a $42-billion cleanup operation and contemplates unloading some of the 362,000 acres it holds around the nine abandoned reactors, a battle is shaping up in Congress over what to do with Hanford’s unanticipated treasure.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) has introduced a bill that would designate the Hanford Reach--the last free-flowing stretch of the once-mighty Columbia--a federal wild and scenic river, granting protected status to the waterway and a quarter of a mile on either side. “I just think this is one of our last, best opportunities to preserve a pristine natural environment, to do something reasonable for salmon, and it really is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Murray said.

The National Park Service has recommended going even further, preserving the range lands north of the river, known as the Wahluke Slope, as a national wildlife refuge. Most of the land is operated as state and federal refuges.

Locals Seek Control

But other powerful members of Washington’s congressional delegation have opposed any such move and backed demands by the three counties around Hanford for local stewardship. The locals want expanded recreational use of the river and--fearing the economic collapse that is likely to come once Hanford cleans up its last wastes and closes its doors--major new agricultural development all along the northern slope.

But environmental groups say irrigated farming will spell an end to the region’s best remaining shrub-steppe habitat and threaten the towering white-sand bluffs that are the Hanford Reach’s most striking feature. Landslides on the bluffs, they say, will decimate salmon populations and could push the surging watercourse into the dangerously contaminated soils on the opposite bank.

“This is what people just ache for: a functioning ecosystem, the opportunity to protect it on a scale that really works,” Smith said. “What a gift for future generations, if we can make the right choice.”

But who, wonder many of those who grew up around Hanford, would be better stewards of the land than the men and women who have farmed it? Should anyone trust a federal government that buried millions of gallons of radioactive waste in supposedly fail-safe containers, only to admit a few years later that a third of the containers are leaking?

“Now that the security needs are gone, we’re just saying, return that property to its historic use. They’ve had it for 20 years, and they can’t point to one single thing they’ve done to enhance it,” said Mark Hedman, a vegetable farmer and head of Wahluke 2000, the group pushing for agricultural use.

“The preponderance of the evidence says the federal government is a poor manager,” added Kent McMullen, president of the Franklin County Farm Bureau. “We don’t trust an area that’s so important . . . to be subject to remote control from Washington, D.C.”

Once a Farm Town

Walt Grisham remembers when Hanford wasn’t an infamous strategic outpost in the Cold War, but a farm town of 450 people on the southern banks of the Columbia. White Bluffs, an old Native American trading town with about 600 residents, was just up the river. Grisham’s family had a small farm there: an orchard, livestock, chickens, a pasture for hay. Coming out of the Depression, they all tried to put their own food on the table.

Grisham already had joined the Air Force in 1943 when rumors started flying about the military guys running around, making inquiries. He heard the news in a letter from his folks: The military men had called a meeting. The government was buying up Hanford and White Bluffs and Richland, too. Everybody had to get out. Grisham’s family had 28 days. They were offered about half the market value of their farm, a settlement that didn’t come through until several months later.

“There was no place to go, and no money to get there,” Grisham recalls. “My mother went out in the backyard and buried a lot of stuff rather than move it: family memorabilia, photos, who knows what all was in there. She had a stroke during the move.” The family ended up in Portland, Ore., a day’s drive down the river.

Somebody came by Grisham’s house with a bulldozer, pushed it into the basement, and lit it afire.

Don Skelton, whose family had been given 90 days to get out, said a team from the Justice Department drove onto his farm and ordered his father to stop harvesting the peach crop. The area’s cemeteries were closed, the graves dug up and relocated.

Nobody could figure out what was going on. It was, by any measure, a massive construction effort. Government cars sped along the dirt roads. A month after the initial meeting, 3,000 construction workers had descended on tiny Hanford, a force that later would grow to 60,000.

The train used to come in three times a week. Within a few weeks, there were two freights a day, with 60 cars apiece.

“I told the fellow I was working with, ‘Well, they’re going to smash the atom out here,’ ” Skelton recalls. “I was joking. I didn’t know. A big plant, no raw materials? Some of us speculated about getting aluminum-bearing clay out of the bluffs. One guy said it looked like a mineral refining plant.”

Everything became clear when the first atomic bombs were dropped on Japan two years later. Worldwide news reports said the plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb had been manufactured at a place called Hanford. There was a lot of rejoicing in Hanford in those days. But not for Grisham. He got done fighting the war and couldn’t figure out where to come home to.

No Parade

“The war ended, and what happens? Almost everybody in the U.S. came home to a hometown. I didn’t, and neither did my friends and neighbors. There’s no parade down Main Street. There’s no memorial for the people from Hanford and White Bluffs who died.

“There’s no doubt the place was exactly what they needed,” Grisham says. “There’s no doubt the whole thing was needed, because Germany was within a whisker of doing it, and you can imagine what would have happened if Adolf [Hitler] would have had the bomb. It wasn’t that it wasn’t needed. It wasn’t that it didn’t have to be done. It was the way it was done.”

Now, the way Grisham and Skelton see it, it’s payback time. The Department of Energy is done with Hanford: Fine. Give it back.

The Hanford-White Bluffs Heritage Assn., which Grisham chairs, isn’t asking for a hand-over of the land. But they want a memorial to the Hanford war dead on the river, and they want a visitors’ center, or museum, to tell people what Hanford residents contributed. Then, Grisham said, land on both sides of the river should be returned to farming uses, once it’s cleaned up, the way it used to be.

“I’m against the federal control. I’m against the wild-and-scenic designation. . . . It scares me that here we sit in eastern Washington, and we’re going to be kowtowing to a bunch of senators and congressmen from all over the U.S.,” Grisham said. “It takes people right out of the picture. God-darn it, we got took out of the picture once.”

Lure Was Money

Jean Thompson, a retired librarian and well-known Richland matron, was 16 when she came to Hanford with her sister in 1944. Her sister’s husband was off in the war. The women heard they could make $54 a week as telephone operators at Hanford, twice what they were earning in Texas.

Hanford paid their way out on the train. They were put up in a large dormitory. Meals were served family-style. “There were big plates of pork chops they’d bring to the table, mashed potatoes and gravy, like you’d eat on the farm,” Thompson said. “They really wanted people to stay.”

Thompson’s sister went back to Texas when her husband came home from the war. Thompson found a husband at Hanford and stayed on to finish her college education, work as a librarian and raise a family. Her husband supervised maintenance crews at the Hanford reservation.

Years later, Thompson figures she’s given as much to the defense effort as anyone. She has hypothyroidism, a condition many believe is linked to Iodine-131 releases from Hanford beginning in the 1940s. Her husband developed tiny particle scarring in his lungs that turned to cancer; he died in 1985. There isn’t a day that goes by, she says, that she doesn’t think about her two daughters, who used to go floating down the Columbia every Sunday in inner tubes--the same river the government now admits had small quantities of dangerous materials released into it through Hanford’s cooling water.

Thompson is one of the few Richland residents who speak out about the health effects of Hanford in a town whose livelihood has been inextricably linked to the facility for two generations. And even she won’t talk of joining the massive lawsuit, scheduled to go to trial next year, on behalf of those exposed to “downwind” radiation releases from Hanford. Not in a town whose high school’s logo is a mushroom cloud.

“What you have here is a lot of people that belonged to the American nuclear society, and they’re not ever going to admit there’s anything wrong. And when you talk about local cities, it’s all about jobs, and fear--that the government might just walk away and leave the mess,” Thompson said.

The way she sees it, it’s up to the federal government now to protect the environmental resource that is Hanford’s legacy, to protect the river against what might happen if local government were to step in.

“I’m for Patty Murray’s bill,” she said. “We have county commissioners who all they do is fight. They can’t get along to take care of our needs right now. If we clean it up, let’s keep it natural, because it is rare to have this kind of resource in the midst of all this mess.”

The heavily Republican Richland City Council endorsed the wild-and-scenic river bill, in the face of 21 other local governments that have pushed for control. The Audubon Society conducted a survey showing up to 70% of residents of the “tri-cities” area of Richland, Kennewick and Pasco back federal preservation of the area.

“Can you imagine what will happen if this falls into private hands? There’d be million-dollar houses here, boat docks. . . . And they’ll do it in a heartbeat. I don’t trust the counties as far as I can throw ‘em,” said Richard Steele, president of the Columbia River Conservation League and a Hanford plant operator for 34 years.

Steele recently piloted his jet boat along the Reach, leading members of the Northwest Power Planning Council on a tour designed to show how critical a free-flowing stretch of the Columbia is to the survival of wild salmon. Biologists detailed the likely destruction of gravel spawning grounds if irrigation is permitted on the adjacent highlands.

David Goeke, project manager for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s refuge on the Wahluke slope, said even test irrigation with new technology could prove disastrous if it doesn’t work.

“The thing is, you can’t say, ‘oops, it didn’t work’ once the bluff goes down into the river. It’s gone. You can’t get it back,” Goeke said. “The quarter-mile along the river is affected greatly by what goes on in the drainage system above it.”

Steele shoved his boat onto a sandbar onshore, climbed out and picked up a handful of inch-long salmon fingerlings, left dry and dead when a federal dam many miles upstream sharply lowered the river earlier that day. This, he said, is what the Hanford Reach is up against: further economic development of the river and its banks at the expense of the wildlife that has managed to survive so much so far.

“The way we feel,” he said, “no more compromise. They’ll compromise over our dead bodies. The farmers keep talking about balance. Well, damn it, they already got half of it. Just take a look out here--that’s beauty! We can’t give that away.”

But Hedman sees no less beauty in the cherry orchards and onion fields that already dot the slopes above Wahluke, themselves part of original Hanford lands that were released many years ago. Sand cranes and ducks are seen as often in the farm fields as in the dry refuge zones, he said. North slope farmers say they shouldn’t be judged by the old-technology irrigation that already has damaged some of the Columbia bluffs; new techniques, they say, can eliminate runoff, and, in any case, they’re willing to restrict farming in the zone immediately above the bluffs.

What should come first into the picture, Hedman said, is the fact that most of his neighbors’ sons are growing up, graduating from college and finding they can’t find any land to farm.

“Places like this present a kind of last frontier for young family farmers to get a start,” Hedman said. “The fact of the matter is, that land will be farmed. Eventually. Because of the population food supply issue. Did you know that the American farmland base is declining by 1 1/2 million acres a year? In the long term, it’s more prudent to be talking about this now than to wait until food prices are 30% of your income.”