The proposal to restart Hanford's Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF) reactor for tritium production, and a related proposal to concentrate all 50 tons of North America's plutonium waste at Hanford and use it as fuel for the reactor, both are moving quietly forward. Both passed key hurdles earlier this year when outgoing Dept. of Energy (DoE) secretary Hazel O'Leary approved the tritium program, approved two possible methods for plutonium waste disposal, and put Hanford at the top of the short lists for both.

In the runup to those decisions, a flurry of publicity appeared, particularly around the FFTF, selling the public with patently false claims about their desirability. (See ETS! #15-16.) With the lobbying and public spinning having succeeded, those claims have evaporated.

Especially noteworthy in the FFTF case was Sen. Patty Murray's loud and insistent triumphing (echoed by other state Congressional delegates, as well as then-Gov.-elect Locke) of Fast Flux as a cure for cancer. The idea was that the reactor--one of the WPPSS ones closed several years ago for safety reasons--would only produce tritium for a little while as a "bridge" to the production of miraculous medical isotopes that may well cure cancer. And who could oppose curing cancer?

There were several problems with this, fully known at the time by all parties. One, DoE considered FFTF an exclusively military mission and never gave any indication of even considering allowing the medical mission. Secondly, there are already far more such isotopes, produced far less expensively, already on the open market, than even the demand generated by a cancer cure would fill. Thirdly, the medical isotope proposal would have involved privatizing the entire FFTF production, including the manufacture of a key element in the U.S. nuclear weapons program.

The Pentagon claims that without resumed production by 2007 of tritium--an unstable isotope necessary to make the bombs go boom--the U.S. won't have an "adequate" nuclear stockpile. That claim, also, doesn't hold up; "adequate," to Pentagon planners, is far in excess of START II disarmament limits already agreed to by the U.S. and Russia, let alone a possible START III treaty already being discussed. In fact-- surprise--the DoE commitment to producing tritium has the direct effect of undermining such talks.

The FFTF and the MOX plutonium disposal program have other problems too numerous to detail here; either the exorbitant cost or the further environmental risk alone qualify them as insane. The medical isotope ploy has evaporated; now that O'Leary has made her decision and left (leaving America's nuclear program in the hands of the same man, Frederico Pena, who certified ValuJet as safe), it's as though the talk of curing cancer never happened. Murray and others, who explicitly stated last fall that their support of more bombs and radiation at Hanford was solely conditional on the medical isotope program, and that they would oppose FFTF under any other condition, are still fully on board.

Meanwhile, claiming they have no money availble, the DoE has cancelled legally required environmental impact reviews and public hearings; the only public input allowed for perhaps the most environmentally toxic proposals in the state's history is through the DoE's annual budget hearings. The next one is in Seattle April 2.

Remarkably--but not surprisingly--local media has played right along with the secrecy and misinformation. The heavy- handed promotion of medical isotopes last fall was, by and large, not questioned in Seattle media (though it was in Spokane!); its later disappearance and the brutal inconsistency of some of the state's highest elected officials went unnoted. This past Sunday, a full front page Focus article in the P-I, entitled "Hanford's Hope," spent 54 paragraphs addressing the clean-up effort in as upbeat a manner as is possible for the expensive, hamstrung, and incompetent attempts to fix the Western Hemisphere's most contaminated toxic waste site, perched on the banks of one of the continent's biggest rivers. In those 54 paragraphs the article does not once mention last year's budgetary gutting of clean-up funds, this year's diversion of $64 million in clean-up over the next two years to FFTF, or Hanford's hope, with tritium and MOX, to compound the disaster.

The only way the re-nuking of Hanford will become a public issue is if the public makes it one. The budget hearing in Seattle April 2 will be a start; groups are organizing to offer testimony and to protest. (Call Heart of America Northwest, 382-1014, or Nonviolent Action Community of Cascadia, 547-0952, respectively, for info.) What the ultimate derailing of these plans will require, however, is a broad and ideologically diverse movement over the next several years: environmental and disarmament groups, but also fiscal conservatives, government accountability advocates, and business leaders who see a greater potential for jobs and profits in clean-up rather than a temporary, capital-intensive tritium factory. Anything less, and our descendants--if any--will be stuck with the results for thousands of years to come.