We're marking the anniversary of the nuclear castrophe at the Fukushima Nuclear Complex in Japan by looking at a potential nuclear nightmare much closer to home. For nearly 70 years the Hanford Reservation - birthplace of the Plutonium bomb that devastated Nagasaki - has been stockpiling massive quanties of high level radioactive waste. For over thirty years, the U.S. Department of Energy has been purporting to clean up this cold war legacy. Hanford's extensive contamination was supposed to be cleaned up decades ago, but at the end of last year the DOE announced that it had once again failed to meet yet another deadline to empty aging storage tanks that have been leaking high level radioactive waste for decades.
On this episode of Locus Focus we talk with Rachel Monto, assistant director of Heart of America Northwest - an organization that bills itself as "The Public's Voice for Hanford Clean-Up" - about the latest developments in the ongoing saga of Hanford clean up. We'll discuss her organization's plans to pursue legal action to realize meaningful clean up of Hanford at long last. We'll also talk about Heart of America's campaign to stop plans to use Hanford as a national radioactive waste dump.
- KBOO