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Hanford
nuke workers win health and safety deal
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A sign warns of radioactivity near a
wind direction flag indicator at the “C” tank farm on the Hanford Nuclear
Reservation. | Ted S. Warren/AP
HANFORD, Wash. – Union workers, who
have been repeatedly exposed to toxic chemicals as they toil to clean up the
Hanford Nuclear Reservation, won a victory last week. The U.S. Department of
Energy (DOE) signed an agreement to install catalytic scrubbers to remove
poisonous vapors leaking from more than 700 tanks filled with radioactive
wastes.
Hanford, considered the worst “Superfund”
site in the Western Hemisphere, produced the plutonium used in the atom bomb
that destroyed Nagasaki, killing an estimated 70,000 people – mostly women,
children, and senior citizens – during World War II.
Speaking at a news conference in
Richland, WA, Sept. 19, Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson hailed
the agreement. “We’re finally moving towards a lasting solution,” he said. “We
should not have to file lawsuits. It shouldn’t have to come to this.” Ferguson
stressed that the lawsuit is on hold and can be re-activated if the Department
of Energy and sub-contractor renege on their promises.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed
three years ago include Plumbers and Steamfitters Local 598, AFL-CIO, the
environmental group, Hanford Challenge, and the State of Washington. The
DOE agreed to testing of new technology to capture and destroy vapors escaping
from the tanks containing the radioactive wastes. They agreed to install
a detection and alarm system and to maintain current safety measures including
scuba-style respirators. They also agreed to pay Washington State and Hanford
Challenge $925,000 to reimburse them for legal expenses.
Mark Mokler, Business Agent of Local 598, told People’s
World in a phone interview, “It’s a good agreement, a step forward in
meeting challenges we have been dealing with for a number of years.”
He said an Ohio firm, NuCon, is developing the thermal catalytic
converters to remove toxic chemicals from the vapors leaking from the holding
tanks. “Over the years, thousands of workers were exposed.”
Abe Garza, who worked 34 years at Hanford, suffers
from heart, lung, and kidney ailments, from his years of exposure to the
toxins. Garza told the news conference, “It’s time the Department of Energy
faces up to the fact that people are getting sick instead of trying to deny
it.” He greeted the agreement but warned, “Time will tell how good it is.
I don’t trust them.”
In July 2016, the Hanford Atomic Metal Trades Council, which
unites the 15 building trades unions representing the Hanford workers issued a “stop
work” order halting work until workers were provided with air respirators to
protect them from the vapors. The DOE and Washington Rivers Protection
Solutions, the sub-contractor hired to perform the clean up, hastily supplied
the respirators.
Less than a year later, May 2017, a tunnel collapsed where
radioactive wastes were stored. Last December, while demolishing a
plutonium finishing plant, scores of workers were exposed to radioactive
vapors. Tests showed that 42 workers inhaled or ingested radioactive wastes.
Environmentalist Marc Brodine lives about 130 miles northwest of
Hanford in Roslyn, WA. “This positive agreement is just one step in a decades
long battle to clean up the environmental disaster that the Hanford Nuclear
Reservation has been,” said Brodine. “It has been a disaster for the
workers, for the immediate community, for the Columbia River and for the people
who were victimized by the atom bombs created from the Hanford plutonium.”
He pointed out that people living down river from Hanford have
waged battles for decades demanding that the Federal government clean up
Hanford that produced 110,000 tons of radioactive materials. “The Energy
Department stored radioactive wastes with a half-life of 10,000 years in
containers supposedly safe for 150 years,” said Brodine. “Those containers are
already leaking into the Columbia River.”
The leakage is such a menace that
the Energy Department is trying to transfer the wastes from single shell tanks
to double shell tanks. But vapors are leaking from both the old and the new
tanks. The DOE has earmarked $17 billion for a plan called “vitrification” to
turn the waste into more stable glass.
Brodine, who is also the chairman of
the Communist Party of Washington State denounced President Donald Trump’s plan
to spend over $1 trillion to “modernize” the U.S. nuclear arsenal. “Trump’s
plan goes exactly in the wrong direction,” Brodine said.
He was echoing the views of Mitsugi
Moriguchi, 81, of Nagasaki, a survivor of the U.S. atomic bombing of Aug. 9,
1945. Moriguchi visited the Tri-Cities areas, Richland, Kennewick, and Pasco,
about a mile from the Hanford complex last March. He is believed to be
the first Nagasaki survivor ever to visit Hanford. Moriguchi said only his
mother’s omen of disaster saved him and his brothers and sisters. She took all
her children out Nagasaki the day before the bomb was dropped. And after
the bombing, she returned to the destroyed city and rescued two of her
older children she had been forced to leave behind.
His host, the mayor of Richland,
took Moriguchi on a tour of Hanford including “Reactor B” that produced the
plutonium that destroyed his city. “It was shocking to me to come to Reactor B
and see it open to the public as a prideful accomplishment,” Moriguchi told
reporters. “Here the production of plutonium has only one purpose: to destroy
human beings. Nuclear cannot bring happiness to humanity.”
CONTRIBUTOR
Tim
Wheeler estimates he has written 10,000 news reports, exposés, op-eds, and
commentaries in his half century as a journalist for the Worker, Daily World
and People’s World. Tim also served as editor of the People’s Weekly World
newspaper. He lives with his wife Joyce in Sequim, Wash. His new book, “News
From Rain Shadow Country,” is a selection of writings covering his childhood
and youth growing up on a dairy farm near Sequim in the 1950s and his
retirement on the family farm in recent years. Tim’s much anticipated complete
memoirs will be out soon.
Copyright 2018 Some Rights Reserved.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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