Trump limits access of board overseeing safety at Hanford Nuclear Reserve [View all]

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For more than 30 years, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board has been entrusted with monitoring some of the most radioactive locations in the United States. That work is now being trimmed by the Trump administration, which has limited the board’s access to the Hanford site in Washington state and other federal nuclear cleanup sites.

These limitations worry some Hanford watchdogs. They argue this could potentially lead to engineering and safety problems being ignored because those troubles could be inconvenient for a federal government stuck in a decadeslong, and very expensive, slog to clean up Hanford and other sites throughout the United States.

At Hanford in Richland, the defense board and its on-site inspectors have had significant roles in making sure a huge and troubled radioactive waste vitrification plant is meeting technical and safety standards. At stake is the prevention of future safety disasters and crippling equipment breakdowns in highly radioactive areas that can hamper cleanup at Hanford and elsewhere.

The change in defense board access accompanies other recent efforts by the Trump administration to adjust its approach to the cleanup of harmful wastes. In one case, the administration, through paperwork, is seeking to reclassify some highly radioactive wastes at Hanford with a less dangerous designation, a move that would cut costs and shorten timetables. Also, the Trump administration has attempted to lower cleanup appropriations for Hanford and other Department of Energy sites, though Congress has had some success in fighting the proposed cutbacks.

These DOE sites — which number in the dozens, the largest being Hanford, the Idaho National Laboratory and Savannah River, S.C — made plutonium, processed uranium and created other materials for atomic bombs. Now, the nation is dealing with vast amounts of radioactive wastes from those efforts.

https://crosscut.com/2019/06/trump-limits-access-board-overseeing-safety-hanford-site