After consistently missed deadlines by the Department of Energy, Washington state is taking the DOE to court to amend requirements on a 2010 agreement. The state is now looking for new ways to hold the department accountable.

The Hanford complex had originally been built for World War II and produced the 20 pounds of plutonium used for the atomic bomb dropped over Nagasaki, Japan. By the time the complex stopped producing plutonium for nuclear weapons, it had also created 177 tanks of nuclear waste, currently being stored underground.

The Hanford Nuclear Reservation is now the largest cleanup site in the U.S., spanning over 586 square miles near Richland, Wash., in the middle of the desert.

The rural area is only a couple miles from the Columbia River, the largest river in the Pacific Northwest and the greatest concern for state residents. Leaks in the tanks have already been detected — if they were to leak a large amount of waste, the river would be contaminated.

The U.S. Department of Energy employs over 8,000 workers on the Hanford site, but not all of those workers agree with the DOE’s cleanup methods. Contractors in the past have kept the DOE accountable by “blowing the whistle.”

Federal courts in 2010 mandated deadlines for the DOE to finish its cleanup on the site. But the deadlines keep getting moved back, and more Hanford employees step forward voicing concerns about the cleanup process. The area has been a cleanup site for 25 years, and it’s estimated to take another 33.

“They’ve consistently mismanaged the cleanup; there’s no doubt about that,” said Bill Lang, an environmental historian and professor at Portland State University. “I don’t think there’s anybody who would defend the Department of Energy’s administration on this cleanup.

Oversight on the Department of Energy has become challenging, as whistleblowers find their comments being met with closed doors and, sometimes, termination.

“The DOE hasn’t really acknowledged whistleblowing at Hanford ever, which makes it really hard to correct behavior that leads to whistleblowing,” said Liz Mattson, program coordinator at the Hanford Challenge. The Hanford Challenge is an organization that helps whistleblowers with resources if they have trouble being heard internally.

Employees who have disagreed with the Energy Department’s course of action have been “suppressed” instead of rewarded, Mattson said.

Within the year a handful of contractors who have been critical of the site’s cleanup process have been fired, including former contractor Walter Tamosaitis who is filing a lawsuit for wrongful termination.

Washington River Protection Solutions, the unit for URS Corp. employing contractors for the Hanford site, declined to comment. WRPS told The Seattle Times on Aug. 20 Tamosaitis was one of 200 workers laid off to “align employment levels with project work scope and federal funding.” WRPS also explained another whistleblower’s termination to The Seattle Times due to “poor performance.”

Mattson gave a different story for Tamosaitis. She said he was fired because he refused to lie about the design on the waste treatment plant, claiming it as finished when it was incomplete.

“There’s the official line of how business is supposed to be done, and then there’s also the reality of how people do their jobs in actuality on site,” she added. “There’s usually two different stories, when you ask for the official story versus boots on the ground, what actually happened. It’s hard to usually get a really clear picture of what’s happening.”

Missed deadlines

Site administrators feel rushed to safely remove the waste before it could cause damage to residents and the environment.

The DOE is required to follow three important deadlines: completing the waste treatment plants to get them operating; retrieving all of the waste that is currently underground; and finishing the cleanup and disposing of all waste.

The waste treatment plants will be used to turn the nuclear waste into glass in a process called vitrification. Without completing the first task, building the waste treatment facilities, the waste being retrieved from underground can’t be transformed and disposed of.

Many have said the site is mismanaged, and that trying to save time have caused delays in the cleanup.

Shortcuts to the site in the past have led to more complications later. The DOE invested years into building the vitrification facilities, for example, before contractors began realizing the design wasn’t going to work.

Mattson said the pressure to make deadlines for the DOE is a double-edged sword. While the public is rightfully concerned about safety measures, she said, trying to rush the process has also led to mistakes and employees losing their jobs.

“If a contractor is having trouble finishing their work on time … if someone blows a whistle on that behavior, then that can have an effect on whether the contractor keeps their contract,” Mattson said. “Often that’s the thing that’s hardest for contractors to deal with, is public perception and media around their work.”

Lang said he believes contractors’ mistakes have been a result of miscommunication by the DOE. He said many of Hanford’s contractors have become scapegoats for the Energy Department when it has failed to meet deadlines.

“It’s pretty difficult to believe that the contractors, any of them — all of them perfectly capable — could screw up again, and again, and again,” he said.

The waste treatment plants were originally supposed to begin operating by 2011, which was a deadline imposed by the federal court. The deadline has now been moved back to 2019, meaning all waste wouldn’t be removed until 2048.

Lee Overton, assistant to the Washington state attorney general, said the Energy Department didn’t inform the state until 2011 that it would not be meeting the deadline within the same year.

Overton said the Energy Department has been uncommunicative with the state about its progress. When it failed to meet its first deadline, he said, the state imposed its own suggestions for the timeline after the DOE failed to offer alternative dates.

“The Department of Energy consented to agree on certain deadlines and they are failing to meet almost all of them,” Overton said. “Is that in part due to mismanagement? Possibly.” 

Hanford’s past and future

The DOE currently spends approximately $2 billion a year on the Hanford site cleanup, totaling well over $100 billion in the coming years. Critics are concerned the department’s discouragement of whistleblowers could lead to inefficiency or fewer safety precautions, especially given Hanford’s past.

Historically the DOE has been extremely secretive about its work at Hanford. For decades almost all Hanford employees didn’t know they were working with nuclear weapons; that secret led to fewer safety measures and cancer risks.

So far about 7,000 former Hanford employees have been compensated for $10.6 billion by the U.S. Department of Labor for health problems, most of them from when plutonium makers were kept in the dark, said Rachel Leiton, director of the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program in the Labor Department.

“The Columbia river itself has been a lifeline for thousands of years,” said Russell Jim, program director of Native tribe Yakama Nation’s Environmental Restoration & Waste Management program. “They’re concerned only with trying to do a cursory cleanup. They don’t seem to be willing to clean it up to a point where everything is safe.”

But John Schweppe, a Richland resident and physicist, said he would only be concerned about the Hanford site if its administrators were not trying to fix the problem. He said it would take a long time and an immense amount of waste to leak for the river to get contaminated.

“You’ve got to keep it in perspective,” Schweppe said. “Everybody’s concerned small leaks can turn into big leaks, so they’re looking into it. … Nobody’s putting their hands up and saying, ‘It’s too expensive; let’s just walk away.’ That would be the only doomsday scenario that I can think of.”

“They’ve been leaking incrementally for a long period of time,” State Sen. Sharon Brown said. “We’ve been aware of the leaks and they’re being monitored.”

The DOE has reduced the cleanup area from 586 to 385 square miles as of 2011, and Brown said much of that area has been returned as public land. The hope, she said, is to make the site both a public reservation for recreational programs and a research district.

When opened, the Rokkasho Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Facility will be one of the largest plutonium production installations in the world.

The international community is worried about the security of the new facility because stockpiles of plutonium can be used to fuel both nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. A terrorist security breach that compromised Rokkasho’s stockpiles would put the world at high risk — and Japan’s lax security regulations have the White House concerned.

The debate

South Korea also expressed its concerns about Japan’s motives, especially given the minimal commercial viability of the plant and Japanese conservatives’ persistent push for their own nuclear weapon program. Japan is the fifth-largest controller of the world’s plutonium resources, but the top four — Russia, the United Kingdom, the U.S., and France — all possess nuclear weapons, while Japan does not because of a 47-year ban on nuclear weapons production in Japan. But there is political pressure to drop the ban.

“They do not say it in public, but they wish to have the capability to create nuclear weapons in case of a threat,” former Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan said in an interview with the Center for Public Integrity.

The security

At a Brookings Institution panel discussion Friday, speakers from the Center for Public Integrity urged officials to take higher security measures at Rokkasho before its production officially opens. CPI journalist R. Jeffrey Smith said, there’s no guarantee that the plutonium “cannot be diverted or stolen.” But Japan’s security remains lackluster by any standards, he said, because leaders refuse to consider theft a possibility.

The $22 billion facility, which will produce up to eight metric tons of plutonium a year, isn’t supplying any of its own armed security guards. Instead, it is relying on police forces to provide armed support.

Japanese hesitance to bolster security stems from a long-held belief that terrorism isn’t a problem within the country. Because guns are illegal to purchase in Japan, officials argue that armed guards don’t serve much a purpose.

The Obama administration’s frustration with that attitudemen has become apparent, Smith said.

According to a presentation by Smith and his colleague Douglas Birch, an Obama official reported that the security normally expected at a nuclear site simply “is not there.” As Birch sees it, officials at the plant are mistakenly treating a national security situation as a matter of law enforcement instead of one worthy of military force.

“There’s no country so safe that they don’t need security,” he said.

According to the United Nations website, NPT is a multilateral treaty with three objectives:

1. Prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology;
2. Promote co-operation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy;
3. Further the goal of achieving nuclear disarmament and general and complete disarmament.

This year’s conference drew widespread attention when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave a speech on the first day. He called for “any threat to use nuclear weapons or attack against peaceful nuclear facilities” to be “a breach of international peace and security.” He also denied that Iran is building a nuclear weapon, claiming that its nuclear program is only for the purpose of producing energy,  a purpose members of oil-rich states have been considering since 2005.

According to a BBC report, every signatory state in the treaty has the right to enrich uranium to be used as fuel for civil nuclear power. Those states are under the inspection of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which submits reports periodically, and as cases warrant, to the U.N. Security Council and the U.N. General Assembly.

Iran was such a case, and was censured last year for secretly constructing a nuclear facility and defying U.N. resolutions on uranium enrichment. The BBC also reported that “technology used to enrich uranium for use as fuel for nuclear power can also be used to enrich the uranium to the higher level needed to produce a nuclear explosion.”

The New York Times reported that the United States is worried that an Iranian nuclear bomb may lead other Middle East countries to develop their own. The Times also reported that the Obama administration is “trying to entice Middle Eastern states out of enriching uranium for reactor fuel and later scavenging spent fuel for plutonium, a step known as reprocessing.” Both can be clandestine ways of making atom-bomb fuel since both are allowed under the treaty, the Times reported.

According to an agenda posted online by Reaching Critical Will, other topics to be discussed include the medical and environmental consequences of nuclear war, strategies to end NATO’s nuclear sharing, sustainable security and the 21st century, denuclearization and peace on the Korean peninsula and implementing the African Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone Treaty.

Reaching Critical Will is a project of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom that “strives for the abolition of nuclear weapons.” It has posted the complete schedule for the 2010 review conference.

The NPT review conference is held every five years in New York.

Further reading: UN NPT section, Government statements for 2010 review conference and information from previous review conferences, (updated and maintained by Reaching Critical Will) BBC Q&A: Iran and the nuclear issue, New York Times article

Aznar, who served as prime minister from 1996 to 2004, opened his hour-long presentation talking about how in the past, Americans died for the freedom of Europe. By the end of the hour, he lamented that the U.S. no longer recognizes Europe as a significant group of nations.

“It is very unfortunate to see that Europe is not a current priority for the U.S. administration,” Aznar said. “There are those who believe the Atlantic alliance is obsolete.”

Aznar spoke in broad terms about his assertion regarding this perceived dwindling importance placed on the North Atlantic Treaty, saying only that times had changed, and, in his view, the U.S. puts most of its emphasis on nations with rising power, such as China, India and Russia.

“Europe is an important part of the world,” Aznar said. And with a tinge of humor: “We have a lot of countries. We have a lot of meetings. I promote to reinvigorate the alliance. I can’t imagine the future of the world without this Atlantic alliance.”

The speech, titled “Beyond Lisbon: The Future of Europe,” was held at a banquet room in downtown’s Chicago Club and attended by more than 100 Chicago Council on Global Affairs members and local university students. Aznar discussed the Lisbon Treaty (signed by European Union members in December 2007) and its potential to transform European and transatlantic relations. The Lisbon Treaty redefined the EU’s leadership role in Europe – reestablishing rules and guidelines and altering the structure of its institutions and how they work. The goal was to bring more democracy and stability to the EU.

The treaty went into force in December 2009, but Aznar doesn’t seem to place much faith in it. He said Europe’s security to democracy and freedom was dependent upon its allegiance with the U.S., going so far as to say that Europe does not have the capacity to establish its own security.

“The Lisbon Treaty is limited,” he said. “How is it possible for Europe to become more influential in the world economy?”

Aznar answered his own question, stating that the EU needs to resolve its economic and immigration problems in Europe and define its interest in the world.

While the focus of his speech was on European economic policy, with Greece highlighted in the world media as a nation in economic peril, Aznar spoke adamantly of nuclear energy – and the exigency for Europe to acquire it.

“Nuclear energy is the key for European stability,” he said. “Without nuclear energy, Europe will be vulnerable. Freedom requires power.”

Aznar closed his speech reemphasizing Europe’s shared interests with the United States: democracy, respect for human rights, civil liberties, collective security, and economic freedom.

Just to drive the point home, he said: “I believe in a Europe that is open to war, in a Europe that is willing to compete in the global economy.”

During his time as prime minister, Aznar presided over economic and social reforms in Spain, saying he oversaw close to 5 million new jobs that left a clear mark on the Spanish economy. He no longer lives in Spain, but in Washington, D.C., where he teaches various seminars on contemporary European politics at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.