Washington to Remove Section of Hanford Site From Hazardous Sites List
A section of the Hanford Site will be removed from the state of Washington’s Hazardous Sites List for the first time, pending completion of a public comment period. “This will basically take it off the books,” said Jane Hedges, manager of the state Department of Ecology’s Nuclear Waste Program. The 1100 Area, the sector being considered for removal, was one of the earliest and easiest pieces of Hanford cleanup, said John Price, the state’s Tri-Party Agreement section manager. Remediation of the 1.2 square miles was completed under the federal Superfund program in 1996, and the 1100 Area was deleted from the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Priority List. But the Department of Ecology kept it on its list of hundreds of contaminated sites across the state, including more than 30 cleanup units at Hanford, because of concerns about tainted groundwater. The contamination beneath the Horn Rapids Landfill was at low levels when the rest of the area’s remediation was completed and it has since fallen below state and federal contamination levels requiring cleanup, Hedges said. The state has been monitoring the groundwater contamination, which has been attenuating without active cleanup.
The 50-acre landfill just north of the city of Richland was used for disposal of office waste, construction waste, septic tank waste, fly ash, asbestos, solvents, and PCBs from the 1940s to 1970. The Department of Energy has said previously it believed the contamination plume of nitrates and trichloroethylene beneath the landfill may have come from a business near the Hanford boundary rather than from Hanford activities. The landfill site is among the acreage the Tri-City Industrial Council had asked to be considered to be declared surplus and made available for economic development, but the landfill has since been carved out of the land being considered. Most of the 1100 Area was used for general support of the Hanford Site, including vehicle maintenance. Some of the land has since been incorporated into Richland city limits, with much of it along Stevens Drive in the north end of the city. Cleanup was completed of pits used to dispose of battery acid, paints and solvents, and antifreeze and degreaser from as early as 1954 to as recently as 1985. There also were some spills of short-lived radionuclides and organic chemicals. Several tanks were buried there and once held antifreeze, gas, and oil. The 1100 Area also includes a small amount of land 15 miles away on the Arid Lands Ecology Reserve, which is part of the security perimeter around the production portion of the site. Public comment may be sent to Price at [email protected] until Oct. 16.
