Main Story: Wash. Wildfire Virtually Out
DAVID FOSTER
Associated Press Writer
RICHLAND, Wash. (AP) -- "One wonders," said Mike Vowels, frowning as he glanced past his son's Little League game toward the smoke-stained sky to the north.
As a wildfire raced across the sagebrush flats of the Hanford nuclear reservation this week, Vowels' first concern was that his home might catch fire. That danger eased Thursday, but he now wonders what the fire might do to radioactive waste scattered across the vast site holding the nation's largest volume of radioactive waste from nuclear weapons.
Government officials say they have matters under control. But Vowels, who has lived next to Hanford all his 38 years, knows the government doesn't always get things right.
"We put a lot of faith in them out there," he said. "There's a lot of assuming that they know what they're doing. But it only takes once. There's always Three Mile Island."
The fire here and a devastating blaze that swept across parts of the famous nuclear weapons laboratory near Los Alamos, N.M., have focused attention on why tons of radioactive material are lying around government sites in the arid and fire-prone West.
The Los Alamos and Hanford sites were established during World War II during the top-secret race to build an atomic bomb. Hanford, about 170 miles southeast of Seattle, produced plutonium until 1986.
"These sites, which we used in the Cold War, have materials that are inherently dangerous," said T.J. Glauthier, deputy secretary of the Energy Department, which runs both facilities. "We have a responsibility to manage them extremely cautiously."
Even so, he said, "natural disasters pose a risk."
The fire that was set to clear brush near the Los Alamos lab raged out of control, forcing more than 20,000 people to evacuate and destroying more than 200 homes. Nuclear material at Los Alamos was protected in bunkers, though there are fears that radioactive material in the soil could wash into rivers from hillsides scraped bare by fire.
At Hanford, the fire sparked by a Tuesday car wreck grew quickly to nearly 200,000 acres, fueled by 100-degree temperatures and high winds.
At the most contaminated Hanford sites -- old nuclear reactors and buried tanks of waste -- there is little danger from the fire. The tanks are deep underground and the reactor buildings have thick concrete walls. All are surrounded by asphalt and gravel.
But there are many areas on the sprawling reservation where soil and vegetation is contaminated by radioactive materials or hazardous chemicals. Radioactive ants, flies and gnats have been found at the complex and the Energy Department two years ago reported an increase in the number of radioactive tumbleweeds blowing around the place.
As fire spread across nearly half the Hanford reservation this week, it burned across an old trench of buried waste and two dried-up ponds where radioactive waste once was dumped, officials said.
The fire also approached a stack of about 300 barrels containing uranium and other hazardous waste sitting amid the tinder-dry brush. Firefighters were able to halt the fire short of the area.
Gerald Pollet, executive director of Heart of America Northwest, a watchdog group monitoring Hanford cleanup, said the barrels were stored in violation of state hazardous-waste laws. Federal officials said it's a temporary situation.
"We have a lot of waste sitting on the reservation," said Energy Department spokeswoman Julie Erickson. "We're trying to get to it as fast as we can."
Pollet said the Energy Department promised after the Los Alamos fire to supply radiation-measuring devices to every firefighter. At the Hanford fire, however, only firefighters on the reservation itself got individual devices. Crews outside the perimeter shared one per crew.
"The lessons learned and promises made after Los Alamos have been ignored by Hanford management," Pollet said.
Federal officials said the devices had not yet measured any radiation above normal background levels -- though they concede that does not mean no radiation has been released from vegetation and soil.
"We expect, with any wildfire, there will be a slight release," Glauthier said. "We just don't expect it to be at levels that would require any action."
Critics say the Energy Department has given reassurances at both the Los Alamos and Hanford fires before the data is in
"It doesn't build confidence that we're getting honest information," said Paul Robinson, research director at the Southwest Research and Information Center, a nonprofit research group in New Mexico.
The Energy Department has a reputation for secrecy that works against its credibility, he said.
"It takes a huge grain of salt -- hopefully not radioactive salt -- to balance what they say with what their organizational goals are," Robinson said. "It's hard to be outgoing and friendly when you have a tradition of secrecy. These conflagrations are a real challenge to the department as it figures out how open to be with its neighbors."
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