Ep. 02: Fallout

The story of the Hanford Nuclear Site | In 1942, the U.S. government chose a remote stretch of desert along the Columbia River in eastern Washington to build the reactors that would produce the plutonium for America's nuclear arsenal. What they left behind may be uncontainable.

177 underground tanks, some of which are leaking, hold 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste, making it the most contaminated site in the Western Hemisphere. Some of that waste moves through the soil toward the Columbia River, the lifeblood of the Pacific Northwest.

“Fallout” traces the decisions that created the Hanford Nuclear Site, the decades of cover-ups, and the cleanup project that has consumed billions of dollars and produced very little success.

Transcript

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Every fall, the Columbia River Chinook salmon return. For three or four years, they've been at sea, ranging across hundreds of miles of open Pacific, from the Oregon coast north to the Gulf of Alaska. They left the Columbia where they were born as smolts, weighing about an ounce. They return weighing around 30 pounds after having fed on herring, squid, and small fish in the ocean. Then, in late summer, something shifts. Scientists still don't know exactly what triggers it, but the fish stop eating. Their bodies begin to change, their silver skin darkens, and the males grow the distinctive hooked jaw that marks a salmon at the end of its life. Then they turn toward the river. They enter the Columbia at its mouth near Astoria, Oregon, where cold Pacific swells meet the river's outflow in an estuary on the Oregon-Washington border. Mariners have called this stretch the graveyard of the Pacific for two centuries. More than 2,000 ships have been lost here, where massive Pacific waves collide with a river that has no delta to soften its force, just a single narrow channel blasting into the ocean. The crossing is considered so treacherous that ocean captains hand over command of their vessels to a small core of specialized Columbia River Bar pilots, maritime experts whose only job is to guide ships across this one stretch of water. The salmon begin their long push east, and they won't ever eat again. Every mile from here runs on fat reserves. The river passes the city of Portland, Oregon, before turning east toward the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, where the river narrows, and the walls of the Cascade Mountains close in on both sides. At Bonneville Dam, the first of the concrete migration barriers, they find the fish ladders and climb. Past the gorge, the mountains fall away and the landscape shifts. Temperate rainforest gives way to sagebrush, bunch grass, and pale sedimentary bluffs rising along the river's edge. They're on the Columbia Plateau now, a high desert in central Washington that receives less than 10 inches of rain a year, sitting in the rain shadow of the Cascade Mountains. The Sahaptan-speaking tribes of the Columbia, the Yakima, Nez Perce, Warm Springs, Umatilla, and Wanapam, have called the river Nichiwana. Each nation pronounces it slightly differently, but the meaning is the same across all of them. The Big River. At a place the Nez Perce called Nipehe, on the banks of the Salmon River, a tributary of the Columbia, radiocarbon dating has documented human habitation in the basin going back at least 15,000 years. Nakia Williamson-Cloud, the Nez Perce tribe's cultural resources director, has said the science confirms what tribal stories already tell. The salmon have been coming back to this stretch of the Columbia for millions of years, swimming upriver from the Pacific by the tens of thousands. Before the dams came, and before the canneries and the commercial fishing fleets that preceded the dams, somewhere between 10 and 16 million fish returned to the Columbia River Basin each fall. Chinook, Coho, Sawkeye, Chum, Pink, and Steelhead, six species in total, each following its own run timing. Today, the fall run may reach 2 million, and most of those fish were born in a hatchery. They migrate up into a river system that once reached nearly 13,000 miles of streams and tributaries. More than 40% of the habitat those rivers and streams once offered is now blocked by dams. Near the city of Kennewick, Washington, at the confluence of the Yakima and Columbia rivers, the salmon turn north. Finally, they arrive at a long, free-flowing stretch of river where the water runs cold and fast over gravel beds. On the east bank, wind-carved bluffs rise 200 feet above the water. On the west, the land rolls in waves of grasses, broken by basalt outcroppings and the occasional cottonwood. After the long journey, the salmon are back home. This is where they were born. This stretch of river, called the Hanford Reach, is home to the largest wild fall Chinook spawning population remaining in the lower 48 states. For the tribes, the return of the Fall Chinook is spiritual. It marks time and sustains life. The first salmon of the season is welcomed with ceremony, cooked with care, and eaten with gratitude. The Hanford Reach is the last stretch of the Columbia with no dam, 51 miles of river running north from the tri-cities of Richland, Kennewick, and Pasco, Washington through remote high desert. But if you're out on a boat drifting that area, you can see them on the south bank. Nine gray concrete hulks sitting on the riverbank. Each one roughly the size of a city block and containing a nuclear reactor that spent decades pumping Columbia River water through its core to make plutonium for the United States nuclear weapons program. For more than 40 years, those reactors discharge contaminated cooling water directly into the ground around them. That contamination is still there, moving slowly through the soil and groundwater toward the river where the salmon are spawning. Ten miles inland, buried in the central plateau of the site, sits 177 aging underground tanks holding 56 million gallons of the most radioactively contaminated material in the western hemisphere. It's the waste from the plutonium extraction process, a different source of contamination from the reactors, but moving toward the same river. At least 67 of those tanks are assumed to have leaked in the past. Two are currently leaking, and a third is suspected of leaking. More than a million gallons of radioactive sludge has already escaped into the ground. The salmon don't know this, so they build their reds and spawn in the gravel the same way they always have. Their eggs hatch in water that upswells from a contaminated aquifer, and their juvenile bodies filter that water through their gills during the most sensitive months of their development. And the people who've always eaten them, the tribes whose treaties with the United States government guaranteed them the right to fish here forever, are still eating them. In February 1945, the plutonium that would fuel the Fat Man nuclear bomb left the Hanford site to be assembled at Los Alamos. Six months later, it detonated over Nagasaki. After that, the Hanford production facility continued making plutonium for another 40 years. The waste it left behind is still there. Each episode investigates a moment when human activity collided with the natural world, what happened next, and who was left to deal with the fallout. The Columbia River runs for 1,243 miles from its headwaters in British Columbia to the Pacific Ocean. For the indigenous nations of the Columbia Plateau, the river is their lifeblood. Culture, identity, ceremony, and sustenance all tie back to the water. In 1855, four tribes of the Columbia Basin, the Yakima, the Nez Perce, the Warm Springs, and the Umatilla, signed separate treaties with the United States government, ceding roughly 33 million acres of their ancestral homelands, an area about the size of present-day Wisconsin. In return, they were guaranteed the right to fish, hunt, and gather at all their usual and accustomed places in perpetuity. The Winapam tribe, who lived along the same stretch of river, signed nothing. Their spiritual leader, the Prophet Smohala, taught that the land could not be bought or sold, that to sign it away was a kind of sacrilege. As a result, the United States government never formally recognized them as a tribe. To this day, they have no reservation, treaty rights, or federal status, but they're still here too. Historically, the area around the Hanford Reach was a mild, resource-rich wintering ground for the plateau tribes, sheltered from the worst of the Cascade winters, where families gathered before following the salmon and game upland in the spring. One of the people who carries that legacy today is Elaine Harvey. Harvey is a member of the Rock Creek Band of the Yakima Nation. Her people have lived in the hills and canyons above the Columbia since time immemorial. Harvey holds degrees in aquatic and fishery science from the University of Washington and resource management from Central Washington University, and has spent nearly 22 years working in Columbia Basin fisheries. She's now the watershed department manager of the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission, or Critfic, an organization that coordinates fisheries management and scientific research on behalf of the four Columbia River Treaty tribes. She brings a mix of traditional ecological knowledge and modern fisheries science to find solutions to the same problems her grandparents watched grow for decades, the salmon in decline and the dams still in place. Harvey also serves on the board of Columbia Riverkeeper, a Portland-based nonprofit that has spent more than two decades fighting to hold the federal government accountable for the cleanup at Hanford. Anywhere that Nichiwana needs defending, that's where you'll find Harvey. In 1957, the Army Corps of Engineers completed the Dalles Dam in the Dalles, Oregon. The reservoir it created flooded Salilo Falls, a series of cascading rapids that had been one of the greatest fishing and trading sites in North America for more than 10,000 years. Two ancient villages went under at the falls themselves, Weam on the Oregon shore, and Sakin on the Washington side. Sacred burial grounds, petroglyphs, and fishing platforms that had been used for generations were submerged beneath the water. But the reservoir spread far beyond Salilo Falls. Harvey's family village at Merryhill, miles downstream, was swallowed by the same rising waters. Salilo Falls went silent on March 10, 1957, four and a half hours after the dam's gates closed. The falls had been carved by the floods of the last ice age, and since then their roar had echoed off the canyon walls, loud enough to be heard ten miles away. Then, in an instant, it was gone. For the tribes of the Columbia River Basin, the erasure of Salilo Falls remains the deepest wound of the dam-building era. But the falls are not destroyed. Sonar mapping has confirmed what tribal members have always known. The rock formations are still there, intact beneath the water. In 1971, the Army Corps completed construction of the John Day Dam, just 25 miles upriver from the Dalles Dam. Its reservoir flooded Rock Creek Canyon, the ancestral heart of Rock Creek Band Territory, just as the Dalles Dam had flooded Salado Falls a generation before. Harvey's grandparents were told to leave with no alternative place to go. It left them homeless. Eventually, they settled in Goldendale, Washington, a small town 20 miles north of the dam. That's where Harvey lives today. Her family lost their home to dam building twice in a single generation. Harvey has spent her career fighting for the salmon and the river her people have always depended on. Today, the threat has changed. It's not a dam, but radioactive contamination moving through the groundwater toward the river where the salmon spawn. That story is what this episode is about. To understand how it happened, let's go back to 1942. In the decades before World War II, the Columbia Plateau was home to a scattering of non-native farmers and orchard growers. The government's Reclamation Act of 1902 had drawn settlers to the region, and two small towns, Hanford and White Bluffs, had popped up along the river. Orchards of apples, pears, and peaches lined the banks. Irrigation ditches fed crops across the benchlands. It was quiet, agricultural, and remote, which, in 1942, was exactly what the United States government was looking for. In December of 1942, Colonel Franklin Matthias of the Army Corps of Engineers boarded a train headed for the Pacific Northwest. He had orders from General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, the United States government's secret wartime program to develop an atomic bomb, to find a location for a plutonium production facility. It needed to be isolated, far from population centers, and have access to enormous quantities of cold water and cheap electricity. Matthias traveled with a team of engineers from DuPont, the chemical company that had been brought in to design and operate the facility. They looked at six sites in Washington, Oregon, and California. When Matthias arrived in the sagebrush flatlands of south-central Washington and looked out over the Columbia River, he knew he'd found the one. As MIT historian Kate Brown details in her book Plutopia, DuPont agreed to take the contract on one condition: no profit. Following World War I, the company had been labeled a merchant of death for its munitions work and its president, Walter Carpenter, had no interest in that reputation following him into the atomic age. For designing, building, and operating what would become the most complex industrial project in American history, DuPont accepted a fee of $1. The Grand Coulee Dam, completed earlier that year, set 150 miles upstream on the Columbia in north-central Washington, and was the largest hydroelectric facility in the country. Bonneville Dam, completed in 1938 in the Columbia River Gorge, more than 250 miles to the southwest, added further capacity. Both dams were already feeding power into the region's scrowing wartime industries. Now they would feed Hanford. Those same dams had, just the year before, inspired one of the most celebrated commissions in American folk music. In the spring of 1941, the Bonneville Power Administration hired a young, unemployed singer named Woody Guthrie, the Oklahoma-born folk legend who wrote This Land is Your Land, to spend a month touring the Columbia River Basin and writing songs about the new federal dams. They paid him $266.66. He wrote 26 songs in 30 days. Among them, Roll on Columbia, later adopted as Washington State's folk song, and The Pastures of Plenty, a vision of the river's bounty feeding a nation still climbing out of the depression. The Columbia itself ran cold, fast, and deep past the site, exactly what a nuclear reactor, which generates enormous heat in its core, requires for cooling. The surrounding land was flat, sparsely populated, and easy to secure. On January 16, 1943, General Groves officially endorsed the site. Three weeks later, the eviction notices went out to residents. Those living in White Bluffs and Hanford, roughly 1,500 people, were given 90 days to leave. But the displacement didn't end with the town's residents. When the federal government established the Hanford site and placed it under armed military control, the surrounding landscape was closed off entirely. The Yakima Nation, Nez Perce tribe, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, and Wanapam people, whose members had long fished, hunted, and gathered along the stretch of the Columbia, were barred from entering the area. Their treaty rights to fish, hunt, and gather weren't revoked in law, but they were made impossible to exercise. What was taken wasn't just land. It was access to the salmon runs that sustained communities for generations, the root fields where women dug camas and bitter root, the burial grounds of their ancestors, and the places where ceremonies were held and language was passed down. All of it was gone overnight, in the service of a weapon they wouldn't even know existed until it fell on Nagasaki. Construction at Hanford began in the spring of 1943. At its peak, more than 45,000 workers were on site, making it one of the largest construction projects in American history. The town of Richland, three miles to the south, was built from scratch to house the site's workforce. The government owned everything, and the residents paid rent to the Atomic Energy Commission. On September 26, 1944, the B reactor sustained its first nuclear chain reaction. It was the world's first full-scale plutonium production reactor. Water pumped from the Columbia at a rate of 75,000 gallons per minute flowed through its core, cooling 2,000 tubes of uranium fuel. The water was then held in outdoor settling basins to allow the most short-lived radioactive isotopes to decay before being discharged back into the river. The government knew the water leaving those basins was still contaminated. That was the design. The settling time was meant to reduce radioactivity to what officials considered acceptable levels, not to eliminate it. From the first day of operation, radioactive effluent flowed from Hanford into the Columbia River. Over the following decades, as production targets increased and retention times dropped from hours to as little as 15 minutes, the contamination grew worse. The B reactor's first days of operation nearly ended the plutonium program before it began. When the reactor first went critical on September 27, 1944, it ran for a few hours, then died. The chain reaction had collapsed entirely. The culprit was xenon-135, a fission byproduct that absorbs neutrons and had been slowly poisoning the reactor. Enrico Fermi, the Italian-born physicist who had built the world's first nuclear reactor under the University of Chicago's football stadium two years earlier, was on site. He calculated that the only fix was to push more uranium into the reactor through additional process tubes. The project got lucky. DuPont's engineers had overruled Fermi's original design and built the reactor with 500 more tubes than his calculations called for. The process worked like this. Uranium fuel rods were loaded into the reactor, where a controlled nuclear chain reaction converted uranium into plutonium. After cooling, the spent fuel rods were moved by rail to chemical separation plants called canyons. Long, reinforced concrete structures sunk into the ground, built so that workers wore remote-controlled mechanical arms to handle the radioactive material from behind concrete walls. In those canyons, acid dissolved the spent fuel, and the plutonium was extracted. The byproduct was a slurry of radioactive chemicals and heavy metals, some of the most toxic substances ever created by human beings. In February 1945, the first shipment of plutonium left Hanford for Los Alamos. On July 16, 1945, it was used in the Trinity test in the New Mexico Desert, the world's first nuclear explosion. On August 9, 1945, the bomb called Fatman, fueled entirely by Hanford Plutonium, detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, killing an estimated 80,000 people. The war ended soon after. Hanford didn't. The Cold War brought six more reactors to Hanford, for a total of nine, along with five chemical separation plants and a workforce that swelled again and again with each new arms buildup. By the time the last reactor shut down in 1987, Hanford had produced nearly two-thirds of the plutonium in the entire United States nuclear weapons stockpile, enough material for more than 60,000 warheads. And in the process, it had generated something nobody had any idea what to do with. The workers who ran the reactors lived in Richland, the government-built company town three miles south of Hanford. In the fall of 1945, shortly after Fat Man fell on Nagasaki, students at Columbia High School in Richland voted to change the school's mascot from the Beavers to the Bombers. The school was later renamed Richland High School. In 1988, students voted to make the mushroom cloud the official logo. It remains on the gym floor today. Plutonium production generates radioactive waste in enormous quantities. At Hanford, that waste came in several forms, and the government's approach to managing it ranged from inadequate to deliberately reckless. The most dangerous material went into the underground tanks. There are 177 of them at Hanford, ranging in capacity from 55,000 gallons to over a million gallons. They are buried in the desert plateau several miles from the river. The oldest and largest are single shell tanks, a single layer of carbon steel sitting inside a concrete shell with no secondary containment. They were designed to last 25 years. They're now approaching 80. At least 67 are assumed to have leaked. As of 2024, two tanks are confirmed to be leaking, and a third is suspected of leaking. More than a million gallons of radioactive waste has already escaped into the ground. What's inside those tanks is a dense steaming sludge of strontium-90, caesium-137, plutonium, americium, nitrate, and more than 1,800 other chemical compounds. Some of it is highly acidic, and some of it is so alkaline that it can eat through metal. In some tanks, the waste is solid at the bottom, liquid in the middle, and produces hydrogen gas near the top, a combination that creates the risk of explosion. The temperature in certain tanks has to be actively managed to prevent the sludge from boiling. The tank waste at Hanford accounts for 60% of the United States high-level radioactive waste by volume. The high activity portion, about 5% of the total volume, contains more than 70% of the radioactivity. By law, that fraction must be vitrified, converted into glass, before it can be permanently disposed of. But the tanks weren't the only place that waste went. During Hanford's operating years, hundreds of millions of gallons of radioactive liquid were discharged directly into the ground through injection wells, trenches, and buried drums. Some of the shorter-lived radionuclides have since decayed. Others, strontium-90, cesium-137, tritium, are still present in the groundwater beneath the site. After nearly four decades, significant quantities of all three remain, slowly moving toward the Columbia River. Washington state ecology officials now estimate that from 1944 through the early 1970s. Somewhere between 1.5 and 1.7 trillion gallons of radioactive and chemically contaminated liquid were released into the ground at Hanford. To put that number in context, it's roughly equivalent to every raindrop that falls on the entire state of Oregon in a year, made radioactive and poured into the desert. On the night of December 2nd, 1949, the government did something at Hanford it wouldn't admit to for 40 years. Three months earlier, on August 29th, the Soviet Union had detonated its first atomic bond in Kazakhstan. The United States was caught off guard. Military intelligence was desperate to understand how far along the Soviet program had advanced and whether American air monitoring systems could detect Soviet nuclear tests from a distance. Someone had an idea. Release a known quantity of radioactive material from Hanford into the atmosphere, then see if the monitoring systems could track it. They called it the Green Run, and they didn't tell anyone. Normally, spent uranium fuel at Hanford was cooled for 90 to 125 days before processing, a period that allowed the most intensely radioactive short-lived isotopes to decay to manageable levels. For the Green Run experiment, workers processed fuel that had been cooled for only 16 days. The result was a surge of radioactive iodine-131 and xenon-133, released unfiltered from Hanford's tea plant into the night air. The plan called for releasing approximately 4,000 curees of iodine-131 under favorable atmospheric conditions. To put that number in context, the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, a partial meltdown at a Pennsylvania nuclear power plant that remains the worst commercial nuclear accident in American history, released an estimated 15 to 24 curees of iodine-131. The green run was designed to release 200 times that. Almost everything went wrong. The weather conditions were poor from the start. Hanford's own scientists had recommended against proceeding, but the Department of Defense, then headed by General Dwight Eisenhower, ordered the run to proceed. Equipment malfunctioned, the weather shifted. Instead of 4,000 Curies, more than 7,700 Cries of iodine 131 were released, along with 20,000 Curies of Xenon 133 in a seven-hour period. That's roughly 500 times what Three Mile Island released, deliberately, in a single night over farmland. The plume spread across an area roughly 40 miles wide and 200 miles long, covering much of eastern Washington and northeast Oregon. Vegetation readings in Kennewick, directly downwind, were found to contain iodine 131 at nearly 1,000 times the then acceptable daily limit, but nobody living in the area was ever told about it. The experiment was classified and remained so until 1986, when local newspapers filed Freedom of Information Act requests that forced the release of nearly 19,000 previously classified Hanford documents. What those documents revealed stunned the region, not just the Green Run, but decades of routine radioactive releases into the air and the Columbia River that were simply part of normal operations, and a systematic failure to disclose any of it to the communities living downwind and downstream. Connie Nelson, who grew up in Garfield, Washington during the Green Run and later developed thyroid cancer, told the National Park Service that she felt she'd been sacrificed. That phrase has stayed with anyone who has tried to understand what happened at Hanford. The people who lived in the path of the plume, farming families, orchard workers, children drinking milk from cows that grazed on contaminated pasture, were sacrificed. Not everyone who knew was a stranger to those farms. F. R. Chen was a farmer with a chemistry doctorate who worked for the Pasco Water District, living on the Ring Gold Bluff overlooking the Columbia River. In 1962, he came across a confidential AEC memo in the course of his work. It warned of high radioactivity levels in Columbia River whitefish that had eaten radioactive moss downstream from the N reactor. Chen stopped eating fish from the river that day, but he couldn't warn anyone else. Sharing what was in that memo would have cost him his security clearance. So he said nothing, and the people around him kept eating. The story of what Hanford did to the people who lived in its shadow begins with a glass of milk. Radioactive iodine 131, released from Hanford's chemical separation plants every day for four decades, drifted downwind and settled on pasture grass across the farming communities of eastern Washington and Oregon. When dairy cows ate that grass, the iodine 131 passed into their milk, and children, whose developing thyroids absorbed radioactive iodine at higher rates than adults, drank it. And families who drank straight from their cows, rather than processed pasteurized dairy, received the highest doses of all, because fresh milk gave the iodine-131 no time to decay before it was consumed. Scientists had understood that radioactive iodine moved through milk into human thyroids since the early 1940s. By the time Hanford started up in 1944, Manhattan Project scientists had already documented that iodine-131 releases could cause thyroid damage. A 1945 internal Hanford memo explicitly considered recommending that only iodized salt be sold in the surrounding communities, or that iodine be added to local drinking water as a protective measure. The proposal was rejected because taking that protective step would have required explaining why the protection was needed in the first place. In 1955, Hanford's director of radiological science confirmed what internal scientists had known for years. The primary exposure pathway wasn't inhalation, it was contaminated milk. None of that was ever disclosed to the farm communities downwind. Tom Bailey grew up on a dryland farm in Mesa, Washington, about 30 miles southeast of Hanford. His father died of cancer, as did four of his father's siblings. Both paternal grandparents died of cancer. Bailey himself was born with a sunken chest and underdeveloped lungs, underwent leg surgery as a child, and at age five nearly died of a mysterious paralysis that put him in an iron lung for two weeks. He later discovered he was sterile. His neighbors called him the glow-in-the-dark farmer, not because they doubted that something was wrong, but because Bailey was the one saying it out loud in a county that depended on Hanford for its survival. He was shunned and physically assaulted. He was once forced off a county road at gunpoint by someone who didn't want local crops to be seen as contaminated. In 1984, Bailey contacted an environmental reporter at the Spokesman Review in Spokane named Karen Dorn Steele. She drove out to Mesa, and Bailey took her on a tour of what people in the area called the Death Mile, a stretch of road near his farm where nearly every family had at least one member with cancer. As they drove, Bailey listed them house by house. At one point, Bailey pulled the car over to the side of the road. He'd been cataloging his neighbor's suffering and realized that he was describing his own history: the iron lung, the paralysis, the lifelong nosebleeds, the sterility. He'd always assumed something was just wrong with him. That afternoon, driving past his neighbor's illnesses, it broke open. He turned to Still and told her, It was Hanford. That's what happened to all of us. Still published her first Downwinder story in July 1985 under the headline Downwinders, Living with Fear. It ran on the front page of the Spokesman Review, with a photograph of Bailey standing chest deep in corn, the Hanford reactors visible in the background. Hanford's chief radiation safety official responded that no off-site health studies had been conducted because they wouldn't expect to find anything. Steele kept digging. She, along with the Spokane-based Hanford Education Action League and the Environmental Policy Institute of Washington, D.C., filed Freedom of Information Act requests for decades of classified Hanford operating records. The government resisted for years. On February 27, 1986, Hanford Operations Manager Michael Lawrence stood at a podium in Richland in front of an overflow crowd. Next to him sat a stack of newly declassified documents, roughly three feet tall, nearly 19,000 pages of early Hanford environmental monitoring records, kept classified for up to 40 years. Lawrence's statement, there was no reason to expect observable health impacts from Hanford's historic radioactive releases. When journalists asked whether the government had studied health outcomes in the surrounding communities, other Hanford officials conceded that no such effort had been made. The documents told a different story. They revealed that Hanford's Cold War operations had emitted more radiation than any other U.S. nuclear production facility. More than 750,000 curies of airborne iodine 131 had been released over four decades across eastern Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and parts of Montana and British Columbia. The green run was in there. The routine releases were in there, and the contamination of the milk supply, the pathway that scientists had known about since 1944, was in there too. Tom Bailey remembered Lawrence at that podium. His statement about no observable health effects felt like being told you hadn't seen what you'd spent your whole life seeing. After the 1986 document release, thousands of people who had grown up downwind and downriver of Hanford began connecting their health histories to the decades of radiation the government had concealed from them. In 1991, Tom Bailey and more than 3,000 other plaintiffs filed a class action lawsuit against five corporations that had operated Hanford for the United States government. The case grinded through the federal courts in eastern Washington for more than two decades. They couldn't sue the government directly since a legal doctrine called the sovereign immunity barred it. They could only pursue the private contractors who would run the site. The Department of Justice defended those contractors, and the United States Treasury paid the legal bills under wartime indemnification agreements signed in the 1940s. The government's central defense rested heavily on a federally funded study called the Hanford Thyroid Disease Study, an $18 million eight-year project run by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, an overseen by the CDC. Its stated purpose was to answer one question: Did childhood exposure to Hanford's iodine 131 cause thyroid disease in the population's downwind? The study's design contained a methodological limitation that downwinders and their advocates identified almost immediately. Rather than comparing thyroid disease rates between exposed and unexposed populations, the study looked only for a dose-response relationship within the exposed group, whether people who'd received higher estimated doses had more disease than those with lower ones. The design made it difficult to detect harm from a contamination event that had affected the entire study area. When preliminary results were announced in January 1999, a staffer at a congressional briefing the night before leaked them to a New York Times reporter. The next morning's front page carried the headline: No radiation effect found at Northwest Nuclear Site. By the time the Fred Hutchinson team held its public announcement meeting that evening at a Richland hotel, the people who attended already knew what the researchers were going to say. One of them was Sally Sanders of Kennewick, who had lost two family members to thyroid cancer and whose brother had also been diagnosed with the disease. She sat through the entire presentation with a sign held above her head that read, in large block letters, I don't believe it. She wasn't alone. The audience interrupted the researchers' prepared remarks. A long line of people waited at a microphone to register their objections: widows and widowers from small eastern Washington towns, people suffering from hypothyroidism and autoimmune thyroiditis, scientists pointing out the study's own findings showed hypothyroidism in 27% of female participants and neonatal deaths 20 times higher than expected. The study's authors claimed their findings should reassure the local residents, but the downwinders did not feel reassured. Trisha Pritikin was born in 1950 in Richland in a hospital open only to Hanford employees, their families, and other government-approved residents. Her father was a nuclear engineer in Hanford's 100 area, overseeing the production reactors. She grew up in one of Richland's identical alphabet houses on Stevens Drive. As a small child, she watched her neighbor, a girl a few years older with long red braids, lose that hair to leukemia. Pritiken's own health problems began in her mid-teens and worsened through her 20s. Severe fatigue, unexplained weight gain, her menstrual cycle stopping at 18. Doctor after doctor couldn't explain it. It wasn't until after 1986, when the declassified documents were released, that her physicians understood what had happened to her thyroid during her childhood in Richland. Her father had thyroid cancer. Her mother had hypothyroidism and hyperparathyroidism. Pritikin herself had hypothyroidism, thyroid nodules, hypoparathyroidism, and eventually a total thyroidectomy. She eventually became a lawyer and enrolled as a plaintiff in the class action lawsuit. In January of 2013, she was randomly selected as a bellwether plaintiff for the second round of jury trials. She'd prepared for years, calculating medical expenses, documenting lost wages, answering hundreds of questions from defense attorneys whose fees were being paid by the U.S. Treasury. She'd waited more than two decades for the chance to testify and to tell a jury what it had cost her to grow up in the shadow of Hanford. Then the parties entered settlement negotiations, and Pritikin never got her day in court. Instead, she documented 24 of the plaintiffs' stories in her 2020 book, The Hanford Plaintiffs, Voices from the Fight for Atomic Justice. In 2015, the litigation ended. Confidential settlements were reached with a small number of plaintiffs. The only condition that qualified her for compensation was thyroid cancer or specific thyroid disorders. The law firm representing the government's contractors had, by that point, billed taxpayers more than $28 million in legal fees. Most plaintiffs received little or nothing. The diseases they connected to their exposure, autoimmune disorders, neurological damage, miscarriages, birth defects, cancers of the blood and lymph system, were not recognized by the court. Only thyroid cancer and specific thyroid disorders qualified for any payment at all. MIT historian Kate Brown spent years researching the American and Soviet plutonium programs in parallel, Hanford on one side and the Mayak complex near the closed city of Ozursk in the Southern Ural Mountains on the other. In her 2013 book, Plutopia, Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters, Brown estimates that each plant knowingly released on the order of 200 million curees of radioactive isotopes over four decades of operation, a figure that may exceed every nuclear accident on record, including Chernobyl. This episode's sources are available at Ecosidepod.com/slash episodes, but the two works mentioned earlier shaped this story in particular. The Hanford Plaintiffs, Voices from the Fight for Atomic Justice by Trisha Pritiken, and Plutopia, Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters by Kate Brown. Russell Jim, a Yakima Nation elder and environmental leader, was born in 1935 in the Yakima Nation near Toppenish, Washington, a small city in the Yakima Valley, deep in the reservation's interior, about 150 miles southeast of Hanford. He grew up knowing the Columbia Plateau the way his ancestors had known it, as a landscape of salmon and camus and bitter root, winter camps in the Mild River valleys, and summer hunting in the alpine meadows of the Cascades. In the 1970s, Jim was serving as a Yakima tribal councilman when he started asking questions about Hanford. His first call to side officials was met with skepticism. The tribe, they said, had neither the legal standing nor the technical expertise to participate in decisions about nuclear waste management at a federal facility. Jim spent the next several years proving them wrong on both counts. He established the Yakima Nation's Environmental Restoration and Waste Management Program, hiring scientists, lawyers, and policy specialists. He studied the technical literature on nuclear waste and learned the regulatory structures. When he testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Nuclear Regulation in January of 1980, he gave the lawmakers a history lesson. The Yakima Nation had a treaty with the United States, and that treaty guaranteed his people the right to fish, hunt, and gather in their usual and accustomed places, including the lands that now set inside the Hanford perimeter. Jim's most significant legislative victory came in the mid-1980s, when the federal government was considering designating the Columbia Plateau as the nation's repository for the most dangerous of radioactive material. Jim hired independent geologists to study the site. They found that nearby volcanoes, including Mount St. Helens, which had erupted in 1980, and the movement of the Columbia River itself made the geology of central Washington unsuitable for permanent nuclear waste storage. The repository plan was abandoned. Jim led the Yakima Nations environmental program for 37 years. He died on April 7, 2018, at the age of 82. Hundreds of people mourned him at the Yakima Longhouse. His body was carried in a horse-drawn procession at dawn to a burial site in the nearby hills. In accordance with Yakima tradition, his photographs were put away and his name was not spoken aloud for a year. The tribal chairman's statement at his death described Jim as a man who had been passionate about the environment and the strongest advocate for riding the wrongs of Hanford's dark history. Near the end of his career, his writing often referenced the treaty obligations the government had broken. He wrote that the treaty was alive, and that to his people it would endure, in his words, as long as a mountain stands, a river flows, grass grows, and the sun shines. The Hanford Reach is the last free-flowing stretch of the Columbia River, 51 miles of unchanneled, undammed river that retains something close to its pre-industrial character. The fall Chinook Run here is the largest remaining wild Chinook spawning population in the entire Columbia River system. It's also where Hanford's reactors sit, and where the contaminated groundwater plume has been seeping into the river for decades. Scientists, working with tribal biologists and state environmental officials, have identified more than 30 contaminants of concern at Hanford that affect fish and other aquatic life. Among them, strontium-90, tritium, and hexavalent chromium. Carcinogen, used as an anti-corrosion agent in Hanford's reactor piping that is highly mobile in groundwater. In some places near the river, hexavalent chromium levels in the groundwater are more than 100 times the EPA's safe drinking water standard. The timing is troubling. Contaminated groundwater enters the Columbia most intensely during the river's low flow periods in fall, right as the Chinook are spawning. That's because when the river runs high in the summer, snowmelt pushes water outward into the surrounding groundwater. Then, when the river drops in the fall, the pressure reverses and groundwater flows in. At Hanford, what flows in is contaminated. Egg and juvenile development occurs from mid-October through May. The fish most likely to encounter the highest contamination are doing so at their most sensitive life stages. For the tribal nations who fish the Hanford Reach under their treaty rights, the contamination question isn't just a regulatory one. It matters because it's what's on their dinner tables. And Hanford is only part of the problem. The Columbia River accumulates contamination from hundreds of sources across its length from agriculture, industry, and upstream development. Tribal members in the Columbia River Basin consume 6 to 11 times more fish than non-tribal members, which means they consume those contaminants at a far higher rate than any standard built around general population consumption could account for. In 2022, a joint investigation by Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica purchased 50 salmon from native fishermen along the Columbia and had them tested at a certified lab. The results showed concentrations of mercury and PCBs that the EPA and both Oregon and Washington's health agencies consider unsafe at the levels consumed by tribal members. These chemicals, after prolonged exposure, can damage the immune and reproductive systems and cause neurodevelopmental disorders. Washington's Department of Health has also issued consumption advisories specifically for resident fish in the Hanford Reach, species like sturgeon, whitefish, and carp that spent their entire lives in the river. For decades, the government set its fish consumption standard at 6.5 grams of fish per day, an amount that fits on a small cracker, adding up to roughly one meal a month. It was calculated for the general population and calibrated to a diet nothing like the one that Native people have. What it meant in practice was that Washington had used the assumption that people eat almost no fish at all to calculate how much mercury and PCB's industry was permitted to discharge into the river. For tribal members eating 6 to 11 times more fish than that standard imagined, the number offered no protection. Years of tribal advocacy eventually pushed it higher. In 2016, after sustained pressure from tribal nations, the EPA raised Washington's standard to 175 grams per day, nearly 30 times larger than what it had been. It was an acknowledgement, long overdue, that the people most exposed had never been the ones the standard was built around. But raising the standard for how much contamination industry could release didn't address the contamination already moving through the riverbed, already accumulating in the fish. The Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission has also issued advisories limiting lamprey consumption from certain parts of the Columbia basin. Lampree are filter feeders that spend years In river sediment, accumulating contaminants at high concentrations. They're also a traditional food of deep cultural significance to the plateau tribes. When the advisory was issued, the commission's executive director, Asia Dakoto, stated that the long-term solution to this problem isn't keeping people from eating contaminated fish. It's keeping fish from being contaminated in the first place. Wilbur Slockish Jr., a commissioner on the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission and a traditional river chief of the Klikatat Band of the Yakima Nation, put it more bluntly. The government allows pollution and then, instead of cleaning it up, tells people not to eat what they've always eaten. And he, more than most, knows what it can cost to fish this river. In the 1980s, he was convicted in a federal sting operation called salmon scam, charged with selling 16 salmon caught out of season to undercover agents in a sting, and sentenced to three years in federal prison. The government claimed 40,000 fish were missing from the river. Investigators later determined the fish hadn't been poached at all. They'd been driven into tributaries by pollution. After his release, Slockish devoted himself to fighting Hanford contamination. The tunnel near the old plutonium-uranium extraction facility had been sealed since 1965. Inside were eight flatbed railroad cars loaded with equipment contaminated during decades of plutonium processing. In 1980, an internal report found that the wooden beams supporting the tunnel structure had already lost a third of their strength. A contractor warned in 1991 that by 2001, the beams would be at 60% of their original capacity and recommended an inspection. That inspection was never conducted. The warnings set in the files and the beams kept rotting. On the morning of May 9, 2017, a worker doing routine surveillance noticed that the soil covering the tunnel had sunk. He looked more closely and noticed a 20-foot-wide hole in the ground. The roof of the tunnel had collapsed. At 8.26 in the morning, the Department of Energy activated the Hanford Emergency Operations Center. After 3,000 Hanford workers were ordered to shelter indoors, the government's solution was to pour 54 truckloads of dirt into the exposed tunnel. It was a microcosm of the story of Hanford's cleanup. The cleanup officially began in 1989, the same year the site's last nuclear reactor shut down. The Department of Energy, the EPA, and the Washington State Department of Ecology signed a contract setting a 30-year timetable to clean up the site. The Department of Energy missed every major deadline in it. In 2009, all three parties amended the agreement and pushed the cleanup deadline to at least 2047. Remediation is still underway, but Washington State's regulators estimate that fully funding the work would require nearly $6 billion a year, roughly double what Congress had been appropriating. It has now been more than 35 years since the agreement was signed, and the site is still not close to cleaned up. The centerpiece of the plan is the waste treatment and the mobilization plant, the Vit plant, in the local shorthand, a massive complex being built on the Hanford Plateau. The concept is called vitrification, mixing the radioactive tank waste with glass-forming materials, heating it to 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit inside enormous industrial melters, and pouring the sludge into stainless steel canisters 10 feet tall by 2 feet wide. In glass form, the thinking goes, the waste will be chemically stable and its radioactivity will slowly decay without escaping into the environment. In 2000, the Department of Energy awarded Bechtel National, one of the largest construction and engineering contractors in the world, an 11-year $4.3 billion contract to design and build the VIT plant. The project has since been reviewed by the Government Accountability Office, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, and multiple federal inspectors general. The findings have been consistently alarming: cost overruns, construction delays, unresolved technical challenges, safety violations, and contractor management failures. The VIT plant now carries an estimated price tag of $24 to $28 billion, roughly six times the original budget and more than two decades past its original deadline. In 2016, Bechtel and its partners paid a $125 million settlement, the largest ever issued by the Department of Energy's Inspector General, after the federal government alleged the company had used taxpayer funds to lobby Congress to continue its own contract. The problems ran deeper than money. In 2011, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, an independent federal body tasked with overseeing safety at DOE nuclear facilities, completed a review of 30,000 internal documents and 45 staff interviews. Its report found that engineers and scientists who had raised concerns about the VIP plant's design had been, in the board's own language, discouraged, if not opposed, or rejected without review. As author Joshua Frank writes in his book Atomic Days, one of those engineers was Dr. Walter Temositis, a longtime Bechtel contractor and PhD chemist who had flagged serious design flaws and was removed from his position. Among the problems he'd raised, the Vit plant had not been designed to withstand a major earthquake. That flaw was confirmed only after the safety board applied pressure to force a review. When Bechtel was required to redesign the structures, the cost estimate jumped by billions overnight. Temo Saidis said it was the only business he'd ever encountered where failing to do the job well led directly to more profit. Meanwhile, the workers doing the cleanup were facing their own version of Hanford Silence. A 2021 Washington State survey of 1,600 current and former Hanford workers found that 57% reported a dangerous vapor exposure event during their time on the job. Abe Garza, an instrument technician who worked at Hanford's tank farms for more than 30 years, suffered permanent brain damage and lung scarring from vapor exposure. His last day at Hanford came in August 2014, when an exposure event sent him to the emergency room unable to breathe. Management had repeatedly dismissed worker complaints about vapor inhalation, insisting that air sampling showed no cause for concern. Internal sampling data obtained by Seattle's King 5 news station in 2016 told a different story. Mercury had been measured at 473% above occupational exposure limits, furin, a carcinogen, at 3,145%, ammonia at more than 1,800%. None of those readings had been shared with workers or with the public. Hanford cleanup is funded through the Department of Energy's annual budget, appropriated by Congress and paid by taxpayers. The firms that produced the plutonium that armed the United States nuclear stockpile aren't writing the checks. DuPont, General Electric, and the other companies that operated Hanford for decades under government contracts absorbed no long-term liability for the waste they created. For the 2026 fiscal year, Congress approved just $3.3 billion for Hanford cleanup for a project whose total estimated cost is between $300 billion and $640 billion. As of April 2026, President Trump has proposed slashing $400 million from that budget for the 2027 fiscal year, which would reduce total cleanup funding to $2.9 billion. In October 2025, for the first time, actual tank waste was processed into glass, more than 16 years after its original operational target. But the facility handles only the less radioactive portion of the tank waste, about 95% of the volume, but less than 30% of the radioactivity. The high-level waste facility, which would process the most dangerous fraction, is still incomplete and isn't expected to begin treating high-level waste until the 2030s at the earliest. And then there's the question of where those glass canisters are supposed to go. The original plan called for the vitrified waste to be shipped to a permanent geologic repository, initially planned for the Columbia Plateau before Russell Jim's activism, and sealed deep underground in stable rock, isolated from groundwater and human contact for the thousands of years required. That repository was supposed to be Yucca Mountain, Nevada, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Congress designated it as the nation's sole nuclear waste repository in 1987. The Department of Energy spent $12 billion studying and beginning construction. But then the politics shifted in the late 2010s. Harry Reid, the former Senate Majority Leader and the most powerful Democrat in Congress at the time, had opposed Yucca Mountain for his entire career. Barack Obama had promised during his 2008 campaign to kill the project. In 2010, the Obama administration withdrew the license application and Congress ended funding entirely in 2011. No alternative site has been chosen. The glass canisters that the VIP plant is now producing are being stored in an engineered surface facility on the Hanford Plateau. It is, at best, a temporary solution. The waste contains plutonium-239, which has a half-life of 24,000 years, meaning half of it decays in that time while the other half remains. Then half of that over the next 24,000 years, and so on. The process never reaches zero. No engineered structure in human history has lasted 24,000 or more years, and plutonium-239 isn't even the longest-lived contaminant in those tanks. The most dangerous fraction of the waste will have nowhere to go at all. It will sit in steel canisters at Hanford, in a state of permanent temporary storage, until the United States government manages to do something it hasn't been able to do in 40 years. Agree on where to put it. Rocky Flats, outside Denver, fabricated the plutonium bomb cores that Hanford's plutonium was used in. It was secretly burning nuclear waste in the middle of the night until an FBI raid in 1992 forced its closure. These sites are part of a network of remnant Cold War nuclear production facilities scattered across the country, each leaving behind contamination on an unfathomable scale that must be cleaned up on the public's dime. Hanford is the largest and most contaminated, but it's not alone. And that's before accounting for growing uncertainty around federal funding for Hanford cleanup. While the site's budget reached a record high of roughly $3.34 billion in fiscal year 2026, up from about $3.07 billion the year before, proposed cuts for fiscal year 2027 could reverse that trend, raising new concerns about whether cleanup efforts can be sustained over the long term. In June 2025, Columbia Riverkeeper filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Energy over a separate issue, transparency. The agency had been developing plans to lease roughly 19,000 acres of the Hanford site to private energy companies, including proposals for solar development and small modular nuclear reactors. A year earlier, Columbia Riverkeeper had submitted a Freedom of Information Act request seeking records related to those plans, but after more than a year, the Department of Energy had not produced a single document. The lawsuit argued that the public has a right to know whether proposals to introduce new development, potentially including new nuclear infrastructure, at a site whose legal mission is cleanup are consistent with federal environmental law. New construction on contaminated land could physically cover areas that still require remediation, complicating or even preventing cleanup. And the new reactors, regardless of their safety profile, would generate additional nuclear waste at a site already struggling to manage the legacy of the last one. Simone Anter, Riverkeeper's senior staff attorney and Hanford Program Director, is a descendant of the Pasqua Yaqui and Hikaria Apache, and brings both legal expertise and personal connection to the work. She describes the Hanford Reach in terms that capture the contradiction of the site. It's the last undammed free-flowing part of the Columbia and home to critical salmon habitat, but also the most nuclear waste contaminated area in the Western Hemisphere. Anter works closely with the Yakima Nation to support public engagement in cleanup decisions and has led the opposition to a new development at Hanford that could compromise the cleanup mission. Working in partnership with Yakima Nation, Riverkeeper's accomplishments at Hanford include blocking proposals to turn the site into a repository for greater than class C radioactive waste and toxic mercury, convincing the EPA to invest in treatment systems that could process billions of gallons of contaminated groundwater, and pressuring the EPA and the Department of Energy to address hexavalent chromium contamination upwelling into salmon habitat near the decommissioned reactors. There are other advocacy groups in the coalition too. Hanford Challenge has spent decades protecting the rights and safety of Hanford workers. Heart of America Northwest provides public oversight of proposed cleanup changes and works to ensure that decisions about the site remain subject to public scrutiny. And the Yakima Nation's Environmental Restoration and Waste Management Program, the program Russell Jim built, remains active with tribal scientists, lawyers, and policy specialists participating in cleanup decisions at every level. The Nez Perce and Umatilla tribes also hold affected tribe status under federal law, giving them formal roles in decisions about how the waste is managed and where it might ultimately go. All these organizations, along with the Oregon and Washington state governments, are currently engaged in a debate about how to proceed. The proposal includes new approaches to treating low activity waste, shipments of tank waste by truck and rail to commercial disposal facilities in Utah and Texas, and changes to the treatment plan for the highest level waste. Meanwhile, the tribes are still fishing and the salmon are still spawning in the same places they've used for millennia. Tribal activist and watershed expert Elaine Harvey, who you'll remember from earlier in the episode, lives in Goldendale, Washington, in the hills above where her family's village once stood. That was before the Columbia River's John Day Dam flooded Rock Creek Canyon and the Army Corps told her grandparents to leave. She has spent her career in fisheries and watershed science trying to make sure the river doesn't claim any more of what belongs to her people. What she is watching now is a new version of the same argument. The justification has changed. It's no longer national security like it was with plutonium production. Now it's clean energy. But the logic is the same. The thing being built is necessary and the benefits are shared, but the cost will be borne primarily by indigenous people. Harvey isn't opposed to clean energy, but she's opposed to the assumption that indigenous communities should bear the lion's share of its burden. Two projects prove that argument. About eight miles south of Goldendale, on a site overlooking the Columbia River near the John Day Dam, a Boston-based energy developer called Rye Development is proposing to build the largest pumped storage project in the Pacific Northwest. The Goldendale Energy Storage Project would work like a giant water battery. 2.3 billion gallons of water would be pumped to a hilltop reservoir, then released through underground turbines when the grids need power. It's designed to store energy from wind and solar, the kind of clean energy infrastructure that the Pacific Northwest needs as it transitions away from fossil fuels. The problem is where it would be built. The site includes Pushpum, a place the Yakima Nation calls the mother of all roots. It's a sacred food and medicine gathering site, a ceremonial ground, and a living seed bank of traditional plants and medicines that Rock Creek band families return to every spring to harvest wild celery and hold the first foods feast that marks the new year. It contains at least six known archaeological sites and three traditional cultural properties. Washington State's own environmental review concluded that the project would cause significant and unavoidable adverse impacts on tribal and cultural resources. The Federal Energy Regulation Commission's independent review reached the same conclusion, and Greenlit the project anyway. In January 2026, the Commission issued a 40-year license to ride development for the project. Yakima Tribal Council Chairman Gerald Lewis responded immediately. Federal agencies, he said, were rewarding bad actors who had spent years finding loopholes to target a new wave of industrial development on top of indigenous sites that have religious significance to the Yakima people. He noted that his nation lacked the political connections or deep pockets to stop them. If a small Christian shrine was on this site, he said, the decision makers would understand what sacred means. Riverkeeper's Simone Answer has also been involved in the fight against the Golden Dale project. She described the consultation process as a model of what goes wrong with tribal consultation. The developer hired Yakima Nation technical staff to complete archaeological surveys, then characterized the tribe as not opposing the project in order to skew public perception. The tendency to treat tribal consultation as a box to check off, Anter said, is a national issue. Riverkeeper and other local advocacy groups are continuing a legal appeal to the state water quality permit to stop the project. The fight over pushpoom drew enough attention to become the subject of These Sacred Hills, an award-winning 2024 documentary by filmmakers Jacob Bailey and Chris Ward, that followed Harvey and other Yakima citizens through public hearings, archaeological surveys, and the decades of displacement that shaped their resistance to the project. Harvey has been asked many times what rye development could offer as compensation for the irreversible destruction of Pushpoom. The developer's answer, she said, was jobs associated with the project. She wasn't surprised. That's always the first thing offered on many of these projects, she told High Country News. She looked at the history of her band's relationship with the Columbia River, the dams, the floods, and the displacements, and asked how many people have gotten rich off of this land and this river and our people. Thirty miles to the west, a different project is moving through Permidding. A Connecticut-based company called Powerbridge wants to bury a 100-mile high-voltage electrical transmission cable under the Columbia River, from the Dalles, Oregon to a substation in Portland. The Cascade Renewable Transmission Project, as it's called, would carry 1,100 megawatts of renewable power from eastern Oregon's wind and solar fields to the population centers along the I-5 corridor. It would require digging a trench through 100 miles of Columbia River sediment using a specialized hydroplow machine, burying a 12-inch cable 10 to 15 feet below the riverbed. Columbia River Keeper, the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission, and multiple tribal nations have raised serious concerns. The trench would stir up decades of contaminated sediment, especially from the Portland Harbor Superfund site. The cable's heat output could further warm a river already stressed by climate change and the thermal effects of the hydropower dams. Finally, the end-of-life plan for the cable, what happens when it degrades after its estimated 40 to 50 years of operation, hasn't been adequately addressed. Harvey says that once one cable is buried in the Columbia, there could be 50 more. The through line here, she said, is that the tribes continue to carry the burden for green energy. That phrase, the burden of green energy, points to something important. Wind and solar are better than burning coal, and pump storage helps the grid deal with the variability of renewables. Nobody fighting these projects is opposed to green energy. What they're opposing is the assumption, inherited from the Manhattan Project and the dam builders of the 1950s and 1960s, that the cost of that clean energy can be pushed onto indigenous communities and to their treaty protected lands without their consent. The Yakima Nation has its own renewable energy projects underway. The Nez Perce, the Umatilla, and the Warm Springs tribes are doing the same. The Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission has published a detailed energy vision for the Columbia Basin that maps a path to a clean grid that protects fish, honors treaty rights, and serves the region's power needs. This vision demonstrates that these communities are not standing in the way of clean energy. They are asking to be inside the decision-making process rather than downstream of it. The word has changed. Plutonium production became hydropower, became clean energy. But the story hasn't. The plutonium currently sitting in the soil beneath Hanford will still be half as radioactive as it is today when it's the year 26,000, a point as far in the future as the last ice age is in the past. No structure built by human beings has ever been designed to last that long. No institution has ever governed for that long. No language has endured that long. When the U.S. government built Hanford, they knew that they were making a problem that would outlast them. What they chose not to do was to let that knowledge slow the production line. Today, the salmon keep coming back. Every fall, they return to the gravel beds of Hanford Reach, where the groundwater upwells in a stretch of river where the Columbia is still wild. They spawn in the same contaminated water that salmon there have for generations. Russell Jim tried to explain to a Senate subcommittee in 1980 what the Columbia River and its salmon mean to the people. All of this is tied together, he said, tied to sovereignty, culture, religion, food, medicine, language, and a way of life. The cleanup at Hanford is underway, and it matters. The vitrification plant is finally processing waste. Billions of gallons of contaminated groundwater has been treated. Hexavalent chromium contamination near the reactor sites has been reduced. These are real accomplishments, built by thousands of people who have worked at Hanford, advocated for it and litigated over it for decades. But the most dangerous fraction of the waste, the high-level radioactive sludge in the oldest tanks, won't be fully treated until at least 2061 by the most optimistic estimate, possibly much later. And while the cleanup proceeds at the pace that federal budgets and politics will allow, the tanks continue to age, the groundwater continues to move, and the salmon continue to spawn. The bomb that fell on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, was made here. It killed 80,000 people in nine seconds and ended World War II. The machine that made it was left running for another 42 years. The question Hanford asks is one that doesn't resolve neatly. It's the question of how you account for a debt that stretches across centuries or millennia, both to those living now and to those who will be in the distant future. The fish don't know any of this. They spawn in the gravel above the contaminated groundwater the same way their ancestors did before the reactors were built, and the same way they will next fall, whatever the tanks beneath the plateau do between now and then. If you want to support the organizations working on Hanford cleanup and Columbia River protection, Columbia River Keeper monitors contamination from the Hanford site and advocates for stronger cleanup standards, with a particular focus on tribal communities and the river corridor. The Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission publishes ongoing fish consumption research and water quality data for the Columbia Basin and coordinates the treaty fishing rights of the Yakima, Warm Springs, Umatilla, and Nez Perse Nations. Heart of America Northwest tracks specific cleanup decisions at Hanford and publishes public comment guides when the Department of Energy proposes cleanup plans for sections of the River Corridor. Hanford Challenge works specifically on behalf of the cleanup workers at the site, many of whom have reported exposure to tank vapors and faced barriers to raising safety concerns. You can learn more about all these organizations and find links to donate at Ecosidepod.com/slash organizations. Ecoside is an independent narrative podcast. Each episode tells the story of environmental harm, who caused it, and who paid the price. These are stories about what humans do to the natural world and what it takes to reckon with it.