Weathered

This is Hanford.

And though most people have never heard of it, this is probably the most toxic place in the entire western hemisphere.

How is that possible, you ask.

Well, this is basically where the nuclear age began.

The waste at Hanford has a broad variety of chemistry.

Take a dart, throw it at the periodic table, wherever it hits, most likely that element is present.

177 underground storage tanks.

Cleanup has been going on for almost four decades and won't be even close to finish within my lifetime.

But scientists have been working on a solution to clean up one of the biggest messes humanity has ever made.

And today, we're going to look at their progress and find out can they contain this waste before something truly catastrophic happens?

One wrongdoing, one accident.

It'll be worse than Chernobyl or anything else.

It's about 2100 Fahrenheit.

Are you catching this?

Meanwhile, there are ambitious plans for Hanford to help usher in a high-tech clean energy future.

But could we just be rushing from one disaster to the next?

It is not dealt with.

It is not contained.

The force from which the sun draws its power has been loose and the end is not yet.

In 1942, the US began a top secret race to develop the world's first nuclear weapon, unleashing a technology that the world continues to fear.

To create plutonium at unprecedented scale, the Manhattan Project needed to find a place with abundant water, a massive amount of electricity far from the coast to protect from enemy attack.

But perhaps most importantly, it needed to be remote and unpopulated because this mission was not only top secret, but incredibly hazardous.

Fortunately, they found just the price.

With fewer than 2,000 people living in the area, the Manhattan Project decided that this site in Eastern Washington State was the perfect place to build a massive plutonium machine.

The US government cleared out whole towns forcing most people to move in just 30 days.

And it was an isolated wasteland and the people were expendable.

Native American tribes, including the Yakama, lost access to critical portions of their treaty guaranteed land and river.

The nine nuclear reactors were constructed along the banks of the river.

Workers at the Hanford site were totally in the dark about what they were doing.

That is until August of 1945 when the world woke up to the news of a brand new kind of bomb.

Short time ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy.

The plutonium used in the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

Just three days later was manufactured at Hanford.

Between both bombs, upwards of 250,000 people were killed, mostly civilians.

These were the final days of World War II, but for another several decades, we continued making and testing atomic bombs.

And back in Washington State, a huge mess to clean up.

In fact, the largest in the country's history.

Because this top secret plutonium making machine was built fast.

From the first controlled chain reaction in Chicago to the first reactor operating in Hanford was less than three years.

Safeguards were blasted through.

Environmental protections thrown aside.

During production of plutonium, they generated 56 million gallons of highly radioactive waste.

There are 177 underground storage tanks.

They are urban steel tanks that were designed for a 20-year lifetime.

And those tanks have started to corrode and there are several that actually leak.

And fast-forward to today and what was once a sparsely populated area is now home to more than 300,000 people.

And for their downstream, the Columbia flows past farms, fisheries, towns, and major cities, including the Portland Vancouver area.

One wrongdoing.

One accident.

Whether intentional or unintentional.

And now you are sitting at 56 million gallons of waste leaking out of the tanks and then killing everything what comes in its face.

It'll be worse than Chernobyl or anything else.

It'll be that bad.

Experts have warned that a major accident, fire, earthquake, or explosion could cause a sudden release of radioactive material.

But scientists think they may have found the solution.

Now the question is, will they clean it up in time?

That's where we decided let's vitrify it.

Let's convert this into glass.

Vitrification basically means converting Hanford's dangerous liquid and sludge into solid glass.

It will still be radioactive, but it will no longer be able to corrode through aging tanks and leak into groundwater.

The biggest advantage of using glass in this case is its amorphous nature.

There are no crystalline sites.

There are no sites where the atoms, you have to replace one to accommodate the other one.

You throw in something, it'll take in its structure.

It's like a sponge, you know?

There's separate vitrification facilities, one facility for low activity waste, that one started up in October and the high level waste vitrification facility that will start up sometime in the near future.

Currently, we're estimating somewhere in the ballpark of 40 years to complete the vitrification mission.

But vitrification isn't the end of the story because the mess at Hanford actually goes far beyond leaking tanks.

We'll get to that story in a minute.

But first, let's take a look at another technology that could transform the world and may once again prove more powerful than humans can handle.

Data centers have been exploding across the country to drive the AI boom.

It's hard to get accurate information about just how many there are, but it's probably close to 5,000.

And that number is growing.

And what does AI need?

Power and lots of it.

I think that is driving a lot of the renewed interest in nuclear and a lot of these big announcements from like Google, Amazon, Meta is just data centers.

Tech giants have been eyeing Hanford as a possible site for a nuclear power plant.

And Amazon recently announced a plan to make it happen.

Hanford, some say, is uniquely positioned to solve a problem that many countries have been grappling with.

How to scale up nuclear power to solve our growing energy demands?

Main challenge for expanding nuclear power is really cost.

So it's a huge infrastructure project, billions of dollars.

A lot of states in the US have deregulated their power markets.

So that means that there's much more focus on profit.

So building a huge capital intensive project is just very risky.

The next generation of data centers won't just use a lot of power.

Some could use as much electricity as entire towns and they'll need it twenty four seven.

So for tech companies, nuclear is looking like a pretty enticing option.

The ideal case is that we see these early users are like niche market of data centers gets the first ones built and that helps bring the cost down.

It helps get standardized designs out.

It becomes more affordable for municipal utilities to start buying and building them.

And here at Hanford, there's a huge track of federal land, massive energy infrastructure and transmission lines, and a highly technical nuclear workforce.

So could this still radioactive site be the perfect place to help build out our clean energy future?

Some say no.

Are cleanup decisions that are being made going to keep people safe, keep the river safe for as long as possible?

Or are they just ways to show really short-term progress to invite development sooner on site?

The plan to vitrify the toxic sludge is now underway, but the mess at Hanford is far from contained.

There are plumes of radioactive waste that already leaked out into the soil and groundwater.

And it's not just the tanks.

There are major cleanup challenges throughout the 586 square mile site.

Right there, the first reactors you come to, they were finding hexavalent chromium levels that were way above what they expected.

Upwelling in the very bomb of the river they pump billions of gallons of groundwater every year out of the aquifer and treat it for uranium and technetium.

And then there's emerging contaminants like PFAS, which were used throughout the industrial systems of Hanford.

There are places such as in the 324 building where the soil is so radioactive that they had to back away.

It was giving off lethal radiation levels.

And the Manhattan Project tossed all kinds of radioactive material into pits, some of which are still sitting there.

One of those burial grounds is super close to the site of the proposed small modular nuclear reactors.

And actually there have been delays in remediation efforts because part of that burial ground is located under the Columbia Generating Station's parking lot.

At the same time, there's a proof of radioactive tritium that flows into the area of the nuclear reactor that's operating.

And that's where the new small modular nuclear reactors are being considered.

When we think about bringing more workers on site or where these parking lots and roads will be placed, do they do impact cleanup?

So will further development stall remediation of the site?

There is reason to be distrustful.

The Manhattan Project was built on secrecy and the decades-long cleanup has been full of misinformation and straight up lies.

We do find that these fish pick up very small amounts of radioactive materials.

The amount in which they pick up is not at all hazardous.

So we know that the, from this angle, the operation of the plant is quite safe.

And we don't understand why they keep telling us that the areas are contaminated and we're not allowed in there.

But yet they keep letting these green energy companies come in and put up solar farms.

Where are we at in this picture?

Why are we not a part of this?

It is not dealt with.

It is not contained.

The cleanup has to come first.

We have a pretty poor track record of fast tracking powerful technology that we don't fully understand as the radioactive waste at Hanford reminds us every day.

But if we're weighing risks, perhaps no risk is greater than climate change.

If we're going to accelerate the clean energy transition, that means making hard choices about what we're willing to build and where we're willing to build it.

Don't wanna dismiss any of the problems and challenges with the nuclear weapons complex and the contamination at those sites.

And then I'm gonna say a word I hate, which is but nuclear weapons is very separate from nuclear power.

Nuclear power is very clean and very safe and is being run very well in this country.

You can have that balance of something that's, you know, reliable, dispatchable power like nuclear, hydro, geothermal and the really cheap but less reliable wind and solar, that combination gets you to the sort of most affordable, cleanest system fastest.

And climate change is an urgent problem that requires us to move fast.

So is Hanford the perfect place for nuclear development after all.

Or is that not even our decision to make?

You see, Hanford might not be the isolated wasteland that some see it as.

Hanford is, is a paradox.

On one side, it's the most contaminated site in the Western hemisphere.

And then on the other, it is this wild, beautiful place.

Because the federal government roped off these 500 square miles, Hanford is uniquely wild.

These 51 miles of river are the last free-flowing stretch of the upper Columbia and wildlife thrive along its spanks.

When they dropped these bombs on these people, it displaced them from their lands and their homes.

But in a way, the same thing happened to us when that Manhattan Project came in.

We were displaced and we were never allowed to return.

And so instead of repeating history, we really just need to take a step back and look at who those burdens are being Placed on.

The Yakama Nation is 10,000 strong now.

We need places to live.

Well, we can go back in and homestead.

Now I know the DOE and the federal government is gonna fight that to the, to the death.

Far as Hanford goes, I'm not sure myself or anyone else is in the position to answer that question of whether or not development happens here because the Yakama still have treaty rights to use this land.

So I'll let the late Russell Jim have the last word.

If you would clean up the place to comply with the Treaty of 1855, we'd protect all future generations, not just the Yakama.