Think Out Loud

The National Park Service runs three different sites related to the WW II Manhattan Project. The one on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in southeast Washington was the first full-scale nuclear reactor in the world. The B Reactor features hundreds of nozzles capping the metal process tubes on the reactor face and even a mint-green control room with all its 40s-era instrument panels. But it’s hearing about the human stories of struggle that make the history come alive. Sept. 26 marks 80 years since the B-reactor first went online. We get a tour from Terri Andre, a volunteer docent at the Manhattan Project National Historical Park at Hanford. 

Seattle poet Kathleen Flenniken grew up in Richland and worked as a civil engineer at Hanford in the 1980s. She served as Washington State Poet Laureate from 2012-2014. In her first year as poet laureate, she published a collection called Plume, which deals directly with how her Hanford area upbringing influenced her.  The book explores the history of the site, the death of her best friend's father from a radiation illness, and her childhood in "Atomic City.” Flenniken sits down with us from the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities.

The 56 million gallons of radioactive waste created from decades of plutonium enrichment at Hanford are stored in 177 massive, underground tanks on 18 different ‘farms’ spread out over the 580 square miles of the nuclear reservation in Washington State. Most of the tanks are single-shelled, but 28 of them are double-shelled, which helps prevent waste from getting into the ground. Each tank holds between 55,000 and a million gallons of toxic waste.  The U.S. Department of Energy oversees the facility and is responsible for preventing the contamination of both the groundwater and the Columbia River. The DOE is also in the process of testing its multi-billion dollar vitrification plant, which is intended to bind-up the radioactive waste in glass logs to safely store it. We get a tour of the tank farm from Karthik Subramanian, who serves as Chief Operating Officer of Washington River Protection Solutions, the tank farm operations contractor. And we sit down with Brian Vance, the Department of Energy’s top manager in charge of Hanford to hear more about tank integrity, the status of the vitrification plant and the overall clean up progress.

The Hanford Reach National Monument,  established in 2000, is a crescent of land with the last free-flowing stretch of the Columbia River flowing through it. It’s also a major incubator of salmon. The Department of Energy calls it “the largest natural animal and plant community in the arid and semi-arid shrub-steppe region of North America.”  The Reach has remained largely pristine, protected from agriculture and development, because it was a security buffer around the central Hanford site – one of the most contaminated spots on earth. But the Reach is still home to a wide variety of  plants and animals, including endangered plant species like the White Bluffs bladderpod and the endangered ferruginous hawk. We get a first hand tour from Mike Livingston, the Washington Fish & Wildlife regional director for south central WA.  

Farmer Alan Schreiber has an alarm on his kitchen counter, and another one in his office. But they are not to tell time, or warn him of impending storms. This alarms warn him that radioactive winds from Hanford are coming. Schreiber’s Eltopia farm is in the shadow of the massive cleanup site, and the alarms are tested regularly. So far, there’s been no problem. And he says he rarely thinks about it. Schreiber farms here because, as he puts it, there’s no better place with such rich soil, abundant sun and cheap irrigation water. Schreiber joins us from our remote studio on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. 

Carolyn Pearce is busy digging up, cutting up and even x-raying ancient glass across the globe for study. Why? She’s trying to figure out the properties of the strongest glass on earth today, ones that have survived for thousands of years. That way the U.S. Department of Energy can be confident in its science to bind up radioactive wastes for thousands of years to come. Some of the glass she’s working with is from a Swedish hillfort, some from glass beads from a burial site in Poland, and some from the Newberry volcano in Oregon.  We sit down with her at our remote studio on the Washington State University Tri-Cities campus. 

The history of Hanford nuclear reservation is often centered on the enormity of its original mission of refining plutonium to power the atomic bombs that would bring WWII to an end - and the clean up of the waste left behind. Robert Franklin is an assistant professor of history with Washington State University Tri-Cities and the assistant director  at the Hanford History Project. He’s made it his mission to highlight the lesser-known stories of the Hanford site’s impact. He sits down with us to share more about the larger history of the site and the lesser known stories, including the Black and low-income families who worked at Hanford.

Long before the Hanford nuclear reservation, the land was home to Native American tribes. The Yamaka Nation has strong ties to Laliik – or Rattlesnake Mountain — and Gable Mountain on the Hanford cleanup site. They are religious sites for the Tribes, and the whole area is ceded land for the Yakama Nation. The lands around Hanford were also used for village sites, gathering, fishing, hunting and social celebrations. But the Tribes were forced off their lands during World War II, and only in the past year have they been able to start to return to hunt and gather there. The Nation is trying to educate its youth and fully lean into being part of the formal efforts to clean up the 56 million gallons of radioactive waste stored on the site.  We sit down with Yakama Tribal Councilmembers Brian Saluskin and Deland Olney, and with Laurene Contreras Laurene Contreras, a Yakama tribal member and Program Administrator of the Environmental Restoration Waste Management Program for the Yakama Nation. They join us on the campus of  Washington State University Tri-Cities, where we are broadcasting from this week in partnership with Northwest Public Broadcasting. 

The Bureau of Land Management administers 16 million acres of land across Oregon and Washington, and wildfires burned a large swath of that land this summer, including nearly half a million acres in Eastern Oregon. For ranchers who lease BLM rangeland for their cattle, that can mean that new leases will be hard to find. The fires also threatened other uses of the land, including logging, recreation, and wildlife protection. Rebecca Carter is responsible for managing rangeland for the BLM in Oregon and Washington and for leading fire recovery efforts. She joins us to discuss how the agency is facing this summer’s fire season.

More than 70% of high school teachers in the U.S. say cell phones are a major classroom distraction, according to The Pew Research Center. Across the nation schools are adapting new bans on phones as they continue to cause issues in student learning. A number of Oregon schools have been adapting new practices to minimize the use of phones in class, ranging from cell phone pouches to new district wide policies. Before the school year began, Gov. Tina Kotek said this summer she’d like to see a statewide approach on the issue. Nick Lupo is the principal for Taft 7 - 12 Middle and High School in the Lincoln County School District. His school has been using Yondr pouches since last year. Gabe Pagano is a principal at Cascade Middle School in the Bend-La Pine School District, where a new “silent and away” policy has been put in place across the district. They join us  to share more on these policies and phone use has changed over the years in Oregon schools.