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Parliament Member Getting a Sense of Hanford

Posted on: Thursday, 11 May 2006, 12:04 CDT

By Annette Cary, Tri-City Herald, Kennewick, Wash.

May 11--Jamie Reed traveled across an ocean and a continent to reach the Tri-Cities, but the trip still felt like coming home.

In the United Kingdom, he is a member of Parliament who represents an area that includes the Sellafield site.

Like Hanford, the site once made plutonium for nuclear weapons. And like Hanford, the economy of the nearby communities is tied to the nuclear site and the approximately 12,000 jobs it provides.

This week he toured Hanford, stopping at the K Basins where spent nuclear fuel was left to decay after Hanford stopped producing plutonium. Same problem at Sellafield, he said.

Employees at both remote sites worked hard to protect their countries during the Cold War, and hazards were not always well understood, he said.

"The legacy is a vast one," he said.

Sellafield has the biggest inventory of radioactive materials in Europe, and Hanford has been called the most contaminated site in the Western Hemisphere.

Much of Reed's interest in arranging with Fluor Hanford to tour Hanford and the Tri-Cities stemmed from his concern over the need to regenerate the economy of the area near Sellafield, West Cumbria.

"If the site sheds jobs, it affects schools, hospitals," he said. "It's a big organic matrix."

Here Reed saw booming construction of buildings and roads, stable and rising property values and good jobs available -- the hallmarks of a stable economy, he said.

It reinforced his confidence in the approach he's pushed in West Cumbria, getting towns with rival interests near the site to work together and encouraging public and private partnerships, he said.

His tour of Hanford left him impressed with how fortunate the United Kingdom is to have a stable national budget for cleanup of its nuclear sites. At Hanford, he saw projects where cleanup work had slowed or stopped because of lack of money this year under a system that sees the budget bounce up and down annually with little notice.

While Hanford is 586 square miles, Sellafield measures just 1 mile by 1 mile, which includes past weapons work for which cleanup is beginning and work to reprocess fuel to be used again in nuclear power plants.

"People live right next door," he said. Stopping cleanup midway through projects there is not an option, he said.

He visited Hanford days after an article was published in his local paper, The Whitehaven News, about the problems at Hanford's vitrification plant. Work has slowed and the cost has risen dramatically to build the Hanford plant to turn radioactive waste into a stable glass form.

Sellafield also has a waste treatment plant, which made news in the Herald last year when a leak of thousands of gallons of liquid nuclear waste inside the plant went undiscovered for months.

Criminal charges, which Reed believes are justified, were filed this spring.

"(The leak) shouldn't have happened," said Reed, a former nuclear worker, like his father and grandfathers. "That plant should have been kept in a condition of flawless maintenance."

But when the leak was identified, it was found by the work force, cleaned up immediately and no radioactive material leaked to the outside environment, he said.

"It illustrates the safety systems in place were robust and effective," he said.

Reed is spending the end of the week in Washington, D.C., where he'll meet with Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.; Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash.; Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash; and organized labor leaders.

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Copyright (c) 2006, Tri-City Herald, Kennewick, Wash.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: Tri-City Herald

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