Video shows workers at Hanford illegally dumping radioactive water

Investigators are looking into the Hanford nuclear facility in Washington state, after contractors were filmed dumping radiation-affected water and later tried to bury the evidence at the site of one of the largest nuclear cleanup efforts in the world.

Several videos obtained by Seattle’s KING-TV show workers at the Hanford facility’s Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP) dumping liquids from large metal containers that are labeled “Caution: radioactive materials.”

“In nearly 25 years of working here I’ve never seen anything like that,” a Hanford worker told KING.

The workers are employed by Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS), the organization responsible for cleaning approximately 53 million gallons of high-level radioactive and chemical waste stored in the containers at Hanford.

The facility dates back to the Manhattan Project in the 1940s. For decades, it produced the majority of the plutonium for the US nuclear weapons arsenal. In 1988, production stopped and the site became a burying ground for radioactive waste. Hanford has since become the most contaminated spot in the Western Hemisphere, prompting a multi-billion dollar clean-up process that isn’t expected to be completed until 2060.

“The soils under Hanford are extensively contaminated over a broad, broad area. The one thing you don’t want to do is create more waste sites,” said Dirk Dunning, a chemical engineer and Hanford expert.

WRPS told state investigators that workers dumped around 15 gallons of potentially toxic water on August 15 and 200 gallons on August 17, according to a document from the Department of Ecology.

Washington law makes it a gross misdemeanor to discharge pollutants into the water or soil. The company was also required to report any discharge of toxic waste to the Department of Ecology within 24 hours.

However, WRPS did not report the discharges for nearly a month, and a notification from the Department of Ecology shows the company only made the report days after KING emailed WRPS, federal and state officials, and the Environmental Crimes Unit of the state Office of the Attorney General about the incident.

“They knew it was wrong (to dump the liquids) but they did it anyway. They were hoping no one would question it. They definitely knew it should have been reported,” a WRPS employee said.

WRPS had been tasked with digging up 18 underground nuclear waste hoses and putting them in containers, which would then be buried in a nuclear waste dump at the facility. When workers found one of their containers filled with rainwater, they decided to dump it onto the ground rather than testing the water or transferring it to new containers.

A contract shows the company would earn $58,333 for each hose that was removed, for a total of more than $1 million dollars, if they finished the project by September 30.

WRPS dumped the toxic liquid in order to meet their deadline, said Tom Carpenter, executive director at Hanford Challenge, a watchdog organization working to keep contractors working at the facility accountable.

“They are here for the money and that’s it,” Carpenter told KING. “This fee structure ignores human nature, which is to take shortcuts to get the money without any accountability unless they get caught.”