Governor Ferguson to Power: Do your job at Hanford

KENNEWICK – At a press occasion Friday, Governor Bob Ferguson joined elected officers, tribal leaders and labor representatives to ship a transparent message: Washington state will take authorized motion to carry the Trump Administration accountable to its obligation to Hanford’s multi-billion-dollar Waste Treatment Plant.

The facility is weeks away from starting operations to show hundreds of thousands of gallons of extremely radioactive and chemically hazardous waste into glass by means of a course of known as vitrification – a milestone within the cleanup course of that has taken years to get to. Once vitrified, Hanford’s waste would stay secure within the glass for hundreds of years, and may very well be safely disposed of, not susceptible to leaking from degrading tanks, seeping by means of the soil into the groundwater, and finally reaching the Columbia River.

Ferguson spoke to reporters Friday alongside the Washington State Department of Ecology Director Casey Sixkiller and neighborhood representatives.

The federal authorities’s determination to halt operations on the Waste Treatment Plant can be “a stunning waste of resources, a violation of multiple legal agreements and a slap in the face to the workers who have brought us to this point,” Governor Ferguson stated.

“We’re all here today to send a clear message to the Trump Administration. We will hold the federal government accountable to its obligation here at Hanford – to live up to its responsibilities and clean up what they left behind,” Ferguson stated.

Hanford’s waste

In 1943, the U.S. navy picked what’s now the Hanford Site in southeast Washington to make plutonium. From World War II by means of the chilly battle, greater than 60 p.c of the nation’s plutonium was made at Hanford, together with what was used within the Fat Man bomb dropped over Nagasaki.

When manufacturing led to 1989, state and federal regulators and the encircling neighborhood uncovered the magnitude of the contamination left behind: 56 million gallons of extremely radioactive and chemically hazardous waste. The waste is saved in 177 big underground tanks on the Hanford Site, and all of them are previous their 25-year design life. Cleaning up and disposing of this waste is a number of the most harmful and complex cleanup work left at Hanford.

Watch the press conference on TVW.