Cleaning Up Nuclear Waste at Hanford

This was sent to me by a good friend, whose son, Greg, is an Advisor to the activity going on at Hanford. He has been working to clean up Hanford for almost 20 years, fighting the government regarding how Hanford leaks are creating horrendous pollution in the Columbia River. This is aimed primarily at people living in Washington and Oregon, however everyone in this country should be aware of the possibilities as there are other nuclear plants all over this country.

RESTARTING NUCLEAR PRODUCTION AT HANFORD?

PUBLIC MEETING:November, 18, 6PM Best Western Hood River Inn.

No meeting in Portland or Seattle. Just when you thought the focus at Hanford was finally on clean-up, the nuclear industry has a new plan to resume nuclear production at Hanford. This new proposal would create more waste on top of the 444 billion gallons of radioactive and chemical waste they have already dumped in the ground back in the days when we were in a Cold War with Russia.This ill-fated, illogical plan called the "Global Nuclear Energy Partnership" (GNEP) would reprocess the highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel that is sitting at reactors around this country. They want to reprocess this fuel to extract the plutonium that could be used in a new class of nuclear bomb. The GNEP worldwide partnership, including Russia, wants to sell you a new version of nuclear power that is "safe, cheap, and very clean". How many times have we heard this one? Have we not learned from our past?On one hand the U.S. is forging a massive war on Iraq that supposedly had weapons of mass-destruction. We threaten countries that are trying to produce nuclear weapons. On the other hand we are the ones proposing to produce more plutonium and make a new round of nuclear weapons.With a new President Barrack Obama we must help him remember our past. We must not forget that the U.S. holds the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. This new plan to re-process spent nuclear fuel sends the wrong signal around the world. It only increases the desire of other countries to enter into a new arms race for protection against our massive arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.The message the Bush administration has told the world is we will do what we want, while we dictate to others what they can have or not have. It is obvious that President Bush does not care about the Non-Proliferation Treaty that was designed to end the nuclear threat worldwide.This is not about being pro-nuke or anti-nuke. It is about making the world a safer place. It is about not creating more deadly waste when we still have not safely contained or treated the over 50 years of nuclear waste remaining from the Cold War.I find it ironic that the old Cold War warriors and the almost dead nuclear industry are trying once again to justify their existence by trying to sell us reprocessing as something that is green and perfectly safe. They even state that nuclear power is good for the planet. They still have not found permanent safe storage for all their waste, but yet they want to make more waste. Good for protecting the ozone. Simply too many lies for too many years.Few people know that back in the 1960's the nuclear industry discovered that the noble gas krypton-85 was a key player in ozone depletion. Yet with all of the concerns now surfacing about global warming, the fact this by-product of nuclear production and reactors is directly linked to ozone destruction. Yet they still want to call nuclear green? Even worse the National Academy of Science has concluded after years of study that there is "No Safe Dose" of radiation and that any dose has some risk to health. Yet knowing all of this, they want to try one more time to jump start a failing nuclear industry by feeding us even more half baked truths.

This proposal is like a horror movie that has been played too many times. Too many people have suffered and died because of the nuclear age. This arrogant behavior of few thinking they know what is best for the rest of us must be stopped.A public meeting has been scheduled to discuss the Draft GNEP EIS in Hood River. If you care about our National Security, if you care about Hanford being cleaned up, if you care about having high-level extremely radioactive waste being shipped on our highways and want to put and end to this craziness, then show up Tuesday night November 18th and bring your friends and family.

Thanks,
Greg deBruler, Hanford Technical ConsultantColumbia Riverkeeper 20 years. Dedicated to Cleaning up Hanford & the Protection of the Columbia River and all life dependent upon it.
Who Are the GNEP Members: http://www.gneppartnership.org/. Send Comments on GNEP-PEIS: http://www.gnep.gov/. Below is one more example that GNEP does not want the public to comment. Instead of having a single e-mail address to send your comments to, they want you to jump through all this to submit comments. They also are holding only two meetings in cities that are not supported by the pro-nuclear industry.

To find out more about Hanford you can check out this government website http://www.hanford.gov/ . This is a government site, so take it with a grain of salt.