Just before year-end, Department of Energy Secretary Bill Richardson announced a decision to site production of tritium (the highly radioactive explosive component in nuclear bombs) at a Tennessee Valley Authority facility in Eastern Tennessee. That's bad news for Tennessee, of course, but a blessed relief for the beleaguered environment out at Hanford. Tri-Cities business interests, with the vigorous backing of Washington's congressional delegation and governor (but the equally vigorous opposition of Oregon's), had lobbied hard for the past two years to restart nuclear production at Hanford's Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF) research reactor.

The FFTF proposal was a bizarre, and utterly fraudulent, plan sold to the public as a privatization scheme that would "cure cancer" (it was covered extensively in ETS! but few other media sources). The Department of Energy was deluged with thousands of negative public comments on the FFTF proposal last spring, after it (reluctantly) held hearings in four cities. Protesters turned out in force at the hearings west of the Cascades, making the case that cleaning up the environmental catastrophe that is Hanford is an issue for all of us--and also would create more jobs than inventing yet another highly toxic, radioactive waste stream.

That outraged public can take credit for pressuring the DOE to not make an awful environmental situation at Hanford worse still. But, like many bad ideas that emerge from the private sector looking for taxpayer handouts (c.f. Olympics 2012), FFTF restart isn't entirely dead. Capitalizing on the regrets from Locke, Murray, Doc Hastings, et al. that Richardson didn't choose to further contaminate the Columbia Basin (see this week's Nature and Politics), FFTF backers are now pledging to press forward with proposals like the medical isotope production, plutonium production for the space program, and other bad ideas, in hopes that one of them will somehow pencil out without big handouts from the nuclear war industry. FFTF is, as Paige Leven from the activist group Heart of America Northwest notes, "a reactor in search of a mission."

As such, FFTF, which was mothballed in 1992 because of ongoing safety and contamination concerns, is being kept on "hot standby" for proposals which do not yet exist. This is diverting money from Hanford clean-up to the tune of $32 to $40 million a year--over $100 million so far through next year's funding cycle. It's an outrageous misuse of money originally intended to begin to address the environmental emergency posed by hundreds of tanks' worth of leaking, toxic stews, making its way into the groundwater and the nearby Columbia. Now that the DOE has declined to do the wrong thing, they, and Congress, need to be pressured to do the right thing: get serious about allocating the money and creating the jobs necessary to start cleaning up Hanford.