my name's tom carpenter i'm the executive director of an organization called halford challenge hanford challenge oversees the clean up after hanford nuclear site hanford used to make plutonium for the nuclear arsenal  started in world war two and it ran nine reactors and production reactors and some other reactors for research and much similar missions like that up until the mid  discovered and isolated by manhattan project scientist who were looking for a way to harness the energy of the atom to make weapons and they do that of institute now has said or they put out a study that's about a trillion dollars to make the nuclear arsenal for the united states so that's a large figure and keep that in mind when we talk about the cleanup which will talk about a little later i've been asked to talk about a little bit about what we do and then about the spent nuclear fuel and whistleblowers and whatnot at hanford and i'm happy to answer questions after everyone speaks so essentially i got involved first in halford in the mid one nine hundred eighty s because whistleblowers came to the organization where i was working which was then called government accountability project it's still there it's a national whistleblower support organization and i was the head of the nuclear oversight campaign in the the workers who first came forward were very brave because they had to maintain a security clearance out there there is very much  us versus them mentality in the community which is still pretty present but it was it was quite a risky thing to speak out against the plant in any way even if it was for increased health and safety or you know environmental compliance and those kind of things which the plant had never had to be in compliance with the environmental laws or health and safety laws because of national security  so what we think about and when you know that reactors in the united states were run you know for commercial purposes that was under the auspices of the nuclear regulatory commission before that atomic energy commission they had at least had some standards that they had to add here to especially after three mile island and you know a lot of standards came and that never really happened at the department of energy so they don't really have a very  robust nuclear safety program they didn't handle their plutonium very safely they certainly didn't handle their nuclear waste very safely and as a result hanford has become the most can tap unaided uclear facility  in the united states and one of the top ten in the world and that's really saying something folks this is a highly highly contaminated nuclear facility that is going to be a threat to the environment to future  generations for the foreseeable future for as long as we can think about the reason is that many of these rated nuclides are present any extremely large volumes out there that have long half life they last long enough to not be a threat and that needs to be put probably in a deep geological repository which is the plan but that's only going to be a very small portion of the clean up out there so how did hanford work well essentially it had nine uclear reactors in each reactor made spent fuel and it had what are called target elements that it radiated your uranium to thirty eight and that transmitted to plutonium to thirty nine and that fuel was then taken from the reactors and dissolved in these very large reprocessing facilities on the hanford site they had five of them built out there and those facilities dissolved the spent nuclear fuel and acid and then used chemicals to separate out the plutonium the very tiny portions of plutonium present and that fuel and as a result was all the nuclear waste that's now stored in underground nuclear waste tanks or in the desert or in trenches or basically in the groundwater because hanford is famous for using its environment its soil and his water as storage media for nuclear waste and for chemicals  and that's one of the reasons it's so maddening of a of a challenge for us to look at and grapple with and try to clean this up there is still some spin nuclear fuel that was left over feet deep that contained many metric tons of spent nuclear fuel and that fuel simply sat in those basins for for decades environmental spots in the entire department of energy complex this was if something bad was going to happen with very significant impacts the united states the department of energy i did a five that caissons which is only a thousand yards from the river those two basins as the most likely to cause a very large environmental threat simply because of the quantity of breda new clive's the condition of the fuel the fact that these bases were old that it's location was right next to the river and bad things could happen in there so because a public outcry because of they have heard advisory board because of groups like heart of america and others pressure was put on the department of energy to address that that issue in two thousand and four most of that fuel was removed except for the many tons of sludge left over and they're still dealing with trying to get that  so we've got a very large challenge ahead of us because of the also the tanks out there they've been in the newspaper recently hundred seventy seven tanks sixty seven have already leaked now we're looking at an additional as many as twenty one tanks including for the first time a double shell tank which is that of was supposed to last essentially through the life of the clean up for another forty or fifty years this kind of  the news by storm after and in turn we heard to some calculations and found that gee if you look at the long term history of some of these tank leaks you show a fairly substantial drop in the liquid level of of waste in a lot of these tanks and bingo they're leaking and again we heard that an intern found this out this was in announced to the governor  governor of state of washington ensley jay inslee who essentially took uk a different turn than our previous governor when she heard about the double shell tank leaking there wasn't much response but when jay  about this he held a press conference and said there's going to be zero tolerance for radioactive leaks at hanford so that was one tank they started with one tank you want to eleven and then they do you know he said oh actually there are six tanks leaking and he said that the next week and then quietly the head of the department of energy's office or river protection said in an organ meeting just a week later oh yeah there's another fourteen on top of that that we think might be leaking as they're finding liquids going into the tanks so somehow water is getting into these tanks and mixing with the waste and so that could be masking the extent of leaks from these tanks and they just don't know how much is going so we're kind of at a it's just kind of highlights where we are which is these tanks were never designed to last this long they were there most of the tags their life ended right around the time that we had a moon shot right back in the sixty's there twenty year design life and here we are in two thousand and thirteen and we really don't have a solution for what to do with all that waste we're supposed to turn it into glass at this big facility called the waste treatment plant whistleblowers a pointed out that there are severe safety issues it started with one guy as he was terminated from his job at the wa plant after raising about fifty technical issues about hydrogen gas explosions and uclear criticality these other people followed with disclosures about corrosion cracky in the vassals larger plutonium particle sizes that could lead to a more likelihood of a critic ality it just piled on so now you've got like the top ten of a research manager that was ph d forty years experience removed from his job boom you're out because you raise these issues right and then came along the chief scientist don alexander for the department of energy he raised a bunch of concerns and then  point now the that part of energy has admitted that they've got severe safety problems with the design and the plant is essentially on suspension and they're looking for ways to kind of get around some of the pretreatment and other areas but it's been all along it's been whistleblowers who have brought these issues forward even in the one nine hundred eighty s when i first started it was casey rudin ed bricker and others who blew the whistle on this and that's our role is to help those folks get the truth out to the public so we know what's going on and then put that truth to work and congress and the agencies that are willing to listen and to try to get some systemic changes so that down the road our children and grandchildren and whatnot will be protected from what hanford is today and what it will be in the future and to do what we can also we are faced with some really imminent risks and my time's up i know so i'll just you know  whistleblower matt taylor and he started off saying i've got i've got two boys and in a way just was his experience as a whistleblower and it showed a picture of the columbia generally station as it panned through the site and we got this phone call from columbia generated station objecting to showing an image of the commie generally station on this commercial about a hanford whistleblower saying that we're not on hanford this isn't hanford you know we demand you take that off and we just  laughed we said well what would you do to us right i mean come on you're on the hanford site you know and we didn't hear anything more from him but that's it they're very sensitive they don't want to get tarred with the hanford brush is how they kind of set it right and we've got some work to do because that facility is beyond its design life the spin nuclear fuel pools are quadruple packed beyond their design they never were designed to hold this much fuel and engine a fundamental engineering principle is you don't use something beyond his design right is the same with a fast flux testability you don't run it to become a reactor to make tritium you know or what it is not what it was designed for so if you kind of start using it for different purposes you have to go through a lot of different analysis and whatnot and i'm sure they'll say they have done that however now you've got you know a very dangerous situation with this above ground nuclear fuel pool that's vulnerable to sabotage to attack to an earthquake to cause a huge accident all you need to do is drain the water from that pool and wait a couple of hours it will boil away and nine percent of that cesium you will equal the dose from journal to a three state area that's not that's what it would take and obviously no one wants to go there but no one also you know we don't talk about them what would happen right because this could be the granddaddy of nuclear accidents because now you can't maintain the tank farms and because no one can get near that place it's only a few miles away from the tank fires right in other areas around the site that need to be maintained we spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year and we need to to simply babysit maintain monitor and measure and control nuclear risks at hanford right these tanks hundred seventy seven tanks they generate hydrogen gas and they have to be monitored and controlled you've got to take the gas out of there if it builds up and there's an ignition source then kapu right you don't want that to happen is a bad day when that happens it could affect other tanks so you would have a very difficult time controlling and keeping the rest of the nuclear issues under control at hanford and vice versa if something happened at hanford that could affect you know whether or not they could control the clubby generating station so this is this is something i never see an end of the any of the other scenarios that they spin up about well what could happen and we're thinking of the worst case scenario and i just sit in my office you go nuts about it there's much more scenarios in what they're talking about but you know part of our job is to point that out to get people in or gys about this it's a very depressing subject so i'm glad you're out here tonight because it seems all this but it's not we've we've come a long way in the twenty five years that i've been working on this jerry been at least much longer than i have in there some people john all right well danny's getting set up thank you everybody thank you to the host who put this together it's such an honor to sit with three of my nuclear heroes up here at the panel but my big hero who is here today is my mom and so this  and as i sit and look at her thinking about some of these issues i grew up in a community my dad was a professor at the university and in our community there were a lot of nuclear protests it was in rhode island and so people used to go to groton connecticut and regularly get arrested for locking themselves in protest to the trident submarines and my parents were protesting all my life when i was young and it's just that reminder that you have to teach resistance to each generation and my mom and dad taught me that and it it passes on  so today i'm talking about a bunch of different things i'm an anthropologist by training yeah sorry oh louder ok i'm sorry apologies thank you i'm an anthropologist by training and nobody has any idea what anthropology is and we still are trying to figure that out ourselves a little bit but it's a study of human beings so i'm going to talk about human beings a little bit because they seem to be absent in the whole discussion of nuclear issues and in particular looking at insert human beings into our nuclear policies because we talk about these things as science and we talk about them as energy or technology or risk but what i what i think about are the human beings behind that and when they're not a part of the decision making we're not making adequate decisions that reflect the full impacts of our decisions and so i want to talk about reinserting people into our energy policies and you just thinking about the picture there with a man who's massed using technology to read an invisible hazard to a child looking how scared the mother is how scared the child is how is it ok that that's our reality how do we accept that and so these are the faces that we need to be seeing when we think about our nuclear policy so were minded of the impacts on ourselves and so that we have empathy with the people who are experiencing these issues these are not just problems for people in fukushima or people in the tri cities they're problems for all of us so we need to connect looking to where these ideas of clean energy that's become one way that i've wanted to examine what how human beings get left out of these equations and how we think we've come to think about nuclear energy as this clean energy source and that word keeps getting used by the end industry over and over again because we can't see it we can't smell it it's you don't see that radiation so it's the idea it's the answer to global warming because it's not dirty like coal it's clean for our environment and as we're going to look with a few images obviously it's anything but clean for the people who live with the risks and the burdens associated with the nuclear energy  so think about that idea of clean and cleanliness and how we sanitize so many of our ideas about nuclear energy i went to energy northwest's website to look at the way that they talk about nuclear power in washington state and how they're talking about the columbia generating station and you know again this idea of the absence of human being certainly came out you know they talked about your amy i'm being the naturally occurring element as the primary fuel source so it makes it seem like oh it's natural like the daisies that come up in the ground dirt the trees that are growing it's uranium xp perfectly natural well and so there's no discussion to the left there's a picture of your ania miners in africa and thinking about the immense hazards that they go through africa provided i think i've seen estimates of like one fist to one half of all the uranium to the united states during the cold war and so we don't think about those long term international impacts and so there are couple of themes i think that keep coming out i like tom's theme about how we think about nuclear and we think about temporary fixes but then we get very old by the temporary and they become the permanent there's a complacency that sort of settles in and so what is temporary ah has become permanent and we've allowed that to happen and so there's that need to resist i think very much there's also i think the need to think that new nuclear decision is local and worse we certainly saw that with fukushima and other issues that it's never contain when we think about a hand for it if she you we have to think about africa been thinking about the navajo and thinking where the uranium comes from and then we have to think about all the places the plutonium went to to the marshall islands to japan and beyond and then seeing this full network rather than thinking in isolation because these issues are so complex and so expensive we need to each other we need to think globally in response here so move on please so nuclear technology the way it's talked about and certainly on that previous slide by energy north west it's always talked about as this controllable science and in that last slide there had been a little blurb about you know our plant operators will safely shut it down if there's any problem it's you know it's again that idea of ease of don't worry we've got this it's it's under perfect control and so we think of we have this great faith in our technology and our science and we think of it in many ways as flawless because it you know it certainly can be miraculous i think if you're a cancer patient new get a chemotherapy treatment and radiation can cure your cancer you could think about it as you know th this wonderful miraculous substance but we can't think about it as a flawless substance certainly and so our nuclear power and our nuclear energy we think about perfect technology but obviously there are human beings who are operating these systems and and human beings as we all know are subject to failure and so we can't have a premise where we're operating needing perfection and then have human beings involved in the mix because we're imperfect creatures obviously back to this idea of radiation not knowing any boundaries and this is something i get i keep coming back to and certainly of i've worked in the marshall islands for about twenty five twenty six years or something now and thinking about the connections you know we often think about you know our oceans as separating peoples like you know they live on the other side of the pacific the pacific rim or we think about them as distant locations but actually the ocean our is the unifier at what it's what brings us together and the natural environment really does that it connects us you know our shared air our shared earth our shared water these are all resources that pull human beings together they don't they don't divide us and so we have to look where our sort of our common stakes are impacted in our common world and so you know if we think about the pacific ocean for instance and and think about you know the previous speaker was showing how the columbia river and the importance of that through hanford and so as radiation becomes a larger issue for the columbia and actually moves into the pacific well that's not just a problem for us it certainly is a big problem for us in washington state but then that becomes a problem for all of our global neighbors who share the pacific ocean similarly what happens out in japan or happens in the mar islands affects us too because we're sharing those same waterways and so we need to be thinking together over to the right there is a picture of a nuclear waste storage facility that was temporary going back to to m's the i'm in the marshall islands after one of the detonations from this is a crater that was left by one of the nuclear detonations in the marshall islands there was an identical crater that was here on the land from a different detonation and to clean up that island in the marshall islands the u s government scraped all the topsoil that was full of plutonium and scraped it into the crater and then mixed it up with cements and left it there in the one nine hundred seventy s and that was meant to be a temporary facility and it you know like like we've been hearing in terms of the tanks and hanford remains and so if we look  at the promises of the united states and look at the track record in terms of how we doing on nuclear waste containment and storage how we doing on health issues we start to see some themes here this was meant to be a temporary facility and now with concerns about sea level rise and climate change that facility is in the verge of falling into the pacific ocean it's full of plutonium with a half life of twenty four thousand years so if that goes into the pacific ocean obviously it's an issue of concern for the marshallese who live there but it's also a concern for everybody who shares the pacific that's where u s tuna fleets are are located and so i guess we just need to be thinking about radiation in terms of its shared aspects because radiation as as we know again from fukushima and other events it doesn't stay in the country where where it comes from and so you know if we make nuclear decisions about the colombia generating state that benefit the sorry the columbia generating station that benefit washington's economy or give us our energy that we need we're making those decisions for ourselves from washington state but should there be a risk or should there be a hazard it's not just borne by us radiation knows no boundaries intergenerational e so maybe our generation gets all the current economic benefits or  from the energy but then we're strapping multiple generations with all the burdens of the way slate do we have the ethical or moral ability to make decisions and say we're going to benefit in our economy now from this use of energy but here's twenty four thousand plus years of waste to you future generations and so our energy use is so short it's so quick and it's it's amazing that we have justified somehow the ability to burden other generations with that so the radiation it travels across not legal boundaries if you know a car travels across linguistic boundaries boundaries of race boundaries of gender boundaries of religion it travels everywhere it is the ultimate connector i think and as we make these long term decisions thinking again about the long jeopardy particularly in terms of our energy when we're sites the one on the top is off of that dome and the marshall islands that i showed and it said really says this island is really dangerous don't come to it and the translation is danger keep off and when we think about how long this plateauing humans around if we think twenty four thousand years and then we think how do we even warn future generations about this on the right and as an example of old english from twelve hundred years ago and we look at how much the english language has changed so we can even understand what our own language was twelve hundred years ago how on earth do we then make caution signs for future generations i can last twenty four thousand years for an invisible substance that they can't see that has leaked under the ground out of tanks that we can't even find and so i think it calls on sort of those moral imperatives for us that's safe that there are no risks there are no hazards and you know the it's because the risks are invisible to us because we're not seeing those and we don't look at pictures of the marshallese with multi generational impacts because their d has changed because of the chromosomal chromosomal abnormalities are manifesting in future generations we don't look at those gnarled bodies and looked at what radiation has done to human beings and so it'll it allows us to keep that sanitized image in our minds where radiation is clean it is safe but in the marshall islands they know very differently and when we look at the u s track record to say oh it's ok we took care of these people we  what is lee what is the u s meeting its nuclear obligations look like it means that nuclear waste facility that's about to fall into the pacific ocean that the marshall islands now owns because the marshall islands is no longer a territory of the united states so the marshallese have inherited that burden in terms of the health care means a nation that has large amounts of radiation still in the environment there there's no col provided by the united states there's no chemotherapy so if you get cancer in the marshall islands you can't even get the treatment that would keep you alive because it doesn't exist out there it means there are no medical records that even explain the procedures that people of had no apology no trust no recognition of the multi generational impacts the u s still maintains that it's only the people who are alive during the testing program and exposed to radiation from just one of the events that were affected and so when we we have to i guess when we're making decisions about you know in washington state for instance are we going to use nuclear energy we have to be aware of the an answer the issues of hope and so i just wrapped up a class teaching the culture of the bomb to two hundred different students and at the end of the class we start out of it it's kind of depressing in the beginning as we talk about these topics and then slowly to the quarter we talk about what are their talents what creativity's do they have how do we harness them how do we get their ideas and their visions of the world injected into these conversations and the images that they came up with were a stone doing and really did leave me hopeful i put up just a few of them you know several played around with photoshop and made these images to the left as one of the volleyball players on the youth volleyball team and she took one of her images of getting excited from one of her games and and turned it into anger and frustration over nuclear bombs another student from taiwan put his head on the face of godzilla and said my generation will not become the generation of monsters that indiscriminately destroys cities i want to allow that there's a picture there of a tie dye that a student made it doesn't do it justice to show the picture but to say we care about these issues we care about what's happened at the bottom picture there of the cranes the students lose learn the story of such doco the japanese girl who succumbed to leukemia after hiroshima and she had been folding those paper cranes to make her wish and she died before she got to the end so two of my students folded all the rest of the paper cranes that she needed in order to make her wish and then wrote this long wish about their hopes for a nuclear free future and so it's when students and the next generation i think when they learn about these issues and they learn what they're inheriting because these are intergenerational issues if we've got elements that have a half life of twenty four thousand years we have to educate every generation the way my mom educated me we have to pass it along because every generation has to get ready for what they're inheriting and so each generation has to learn a new with their wrists and the dangers involved and so now more than ever there needs to be that renewal because  we can't allow it sort of the era of protests which were around vietnam and starting around a lot of nuclear protests we have to find a way for that to continue into the future because we have to get each generation ready  and this is one of my favorite student images and i'll leave it with this so one of my students took photographs of every student in the class and then made a mere aloud of it of the bomb and use the quote like you're the bomb which means like you're you're terrific you're something big and he made that message to his classmates to say you know what you are the bomb because you're making the decisions about what happens with the bomb when we talk about the bomb we use that word the like it's an like it's a thing but it's that reminder that no it's human beings who make the decisions about how to use them and what we do with our nuclear powered so he was kind of asserting personal responsibility over these issues in a way that i thought was infinitely creative and so i'm excited to get that next generation involved they've got different ideas about social media and creativity and arts and how we just need to get them prepared  allow them the space to join us and i think that's about all i have what i'm going to do is take off a little bit from where tom carpenter left off and talk about the relationship with hanford and the high level nuclear waste tank leaks and then come back to what we can do organizing and how you can have an impact so let's just go to the next slide here and hit it again and again until we get all the words up on this and let me walk around here so we've already talked about him first has fifty three million gallons of high level nuclear waste in these tanks and one of the it wasn't news to those of us working on oversight of hanford cleanup that there were tanks leaking it was news to everyone else but it sure wasn't to us and tom began to talk about the location of the columbia generating station at hanford which is here and the reality here is one at this time said they don't want to acknowledge how many of you testified on this region one of the issues that a number of people did raise in their comments is the fact that the reactor sits at hanford so what happens when we have a massive earthquake or other clammy that shuts down electrical power supply so the nuclear regulatory commission focuses on you're going to get new additional electrical support in there or diesel generators that work for three days and then we're going to bring in resources and we'll fix the power supply and the cooling pond will be just fine everything is hunky dory because we're going to bring in all those resources and rewire everything and it's fine that might work somewhere else that's these the only reactor though where that if you don't get water in top of it it catches fire and you have an immediate nuclear calamity right next to the river plus the fact that the walls will part in a mild earthquake and release radiation into the river but the calamity for all of eastern washington eastern oregon spokane and further is that it won't take hours for that stuff to take its catch fire it will take minutes and a huge plume would erupt but that ain't nothing because let's see where would that be plan b here tom right here at hanford in what's called the b plants is the largest concentration on the earth of stuff that is hotter than spent fuel it is the extracted strontium and cesium out of spent nuclear fuel rods put into capsules and in a fifty year old swimming pool and they don't even pretend it has the safety back ups of a cooling pool pond or swimming pool for the commercial reactor nowhere close no pretense about containment no pretense that it resists a mild earthquake that thing fails the water goes down the first priority is not getting water to the energy north west reactor the first priority which would take days because it's in the surrounded by a high level nuclear waste thanks the first priority is getting a water supply back on there because it has far more than one nuclear reactors worth of radiation and it is far hotter and it would literally mean everything in eastern washington has to be destroyed in terms of crops years ago when we were all fighting the f f t f nuke breeder nuclear reactor being restarted through the freedom of information act we've got their emergency response plan for what they considered a credible nuclear accident at the f f t f reactor  which is around here and that return the sea response plan was and i quote interdict all milk food and agricultural products in eastern washington and eastern oregon that's nothing compared to what happens in a credible earthquake or other natural disaster at hanford when you add in the columbia generating station plus you've got the high level nuclear waste tanks those tanks are likely to have collapses in a mild earthquake the dome on these tanks is old carbon steel underneath twenty feet of dirt and gravel and we don't know how stable and secure those domes are on those high level waste tanks our state in its infinite stupidity agreed to give the energy department from twenty eighteen when the tanks for supposed be emptied until the year two thousand and forty to empty the single shell tanks in agreement that was reached just in october two thousand  one would think that maybe the state of washington would be having buyer's remorse about this deal now that we know what the watchdog groups were saying is true that those single shell tanks were leaking let's go to the next s here so this kind of just shows a picture of what happens with leaks in schematic leaks go down into the ground and spread to the groundwater and it takes twenty to fifty years to reach the river it's the estimate pending on where the tank is if these tanks were leaking already for ten years then the waste is gone further down into the ground the state of washington the energy department are acting  if we just discovered the leaks their news releases and their public statements were we've got and i'm quoting from the energy department decades before we have to act not true of one of the high level nuclear waste tank farms just from overhead showing different where six tanks are this is the result of gamma radiation probes being put into holes in the tank farm around the tanks this is you just saw the last slide showed six tanks an overview schematic here are six tanks this is the surface level the ground and this is the depth down below ground level and this is where ground water is flowing these are showing gamma radiation levels from the probes in the soil and then doing a computer simulation based on that of how far out the radiation spreads which is our leaks from the tanks if we don't empty these tanks you can't clean up the leaks and if we so if we take to the air two thousand and forty to empty the tanks this is what the leaks look like in two thousand and six obviously you've got a disaster spreading to the columbia river if you wait until the year two thousand and forty you just start getting lots under here what's so fascinating about this is that from one thousand nine hundred ninety six to two thousand and two the gamma borehole probe showed in this tank farm an increase in gamma radiation significantly below the tanks fifty fold increase and that is and numerous increases in the bore holes right beneath the tanks below fifty fold the only potential conclusion is that these tanks were leaking  behind my seat at my heart of america northwest office i have a thirty plus year old photograph of the inside of the tank and in it you clearly see the rings formed on the top of the crust of the waste from water and liquid i don't like calling it water because it's contaminated runoff from in the tank farm dripping into the tank steadily we've known about liquid getting into the tanks for decades and decades not something new we said your attempt to measure whether or not the tanks were leaking based on putting a probe down here and seeing what the level was is ridiculous first off changes with barometric pressure secondly you're not taking into account the stuff that's leaking in you don't know how much is leaking in so how do you know if the measurement goes down and they were going down they'd made it that but they said well at it's due to evaporation et cetera and then take into account what was coming in nor did they these let's go next slide the energy department called these tanks stable and continues to call them stable today their effort to characterize ignores the  around these tanks and stead relies on sticking in probes four times a year and seeing what the level change was and so our state has failed to require state of the art monitoring outside the tank to detect these leaks and even today we're not requiring it in the light of this disaster many of you also may have commented on the hanford hazardous waste permit which there were two rounds of hearings on last year called the recruit permit many of us said this we have the authority to require this why aren't we were quarreling it the state said we don't need it they're sticking the summer and here is the ringer then the state confessed to us we actually were told last summer that about the first potential leak and they'd chose not to disclose it at the public hearings on the hanford hazardous waste permit when people were out there testifying saying why aren't you using leak detection our state has been complicit in this keep going is a summary here fifty fold increase not improper monitoring the runoff into the tanks has been known what we need to do is have the waste leaks monitored we have available technologies to empty some of these tanks and treat some of the wastes for them yesterday i was told that the governor is indeed going to have a meeting with the director of ecology and and one of the companies that is said that they can treat waste from eleven tanks on april tenth we're going to have a meeting the governor did change course from the last eight years and announce it's probably nine billion dollars over budget and a decade away from ever operating if they ever solve the explosive gas and all the in the critic ality problems so we can do something about this now as a legislator let me tell you that there are very few people who meet with their legislators and the most impactful thing you can do is simply whether it's meeting with a city council member so if they see you face to face and say why is seattle an owner an operator of the columbia generating station or meeting with legislators and saying well how come you voted in the middle of the fukushima meltdown crisis to pass a resolution supporting relicensing the c g s reactor which was insane and saying to them it's time to change course we have the ability in our state to replace this energy and create wonderful clean energy jobs with conservation and renewable and meet our state's renewable energy targets and fit our state's climate change goals and what it takes is simply you know one on one meetings with the public utility boards and the city council officials and asking mayoral candidates and there are like more mayoral candidates than there are people in this room  so ask them do you know that your own the columbia generating station asked the ones who are on the city council how come you have never ever ever said to seattle city light we should be concerned and voice opposition to having that reactor run for another twenty years we support shutting it down ask them in a crowded room as a candidate because they can stand up in front of people in seattle and say i'm not concerned and that we don't want to take responsibility with our vote as an owner of columbia generating station and same thing is true of clark p u d and the home us this was with alliance for nuclear accountability came in and we got to design the two are pretty much so that was interesting but i did do one of those tours and they took me to the in reactor area and we went by what  called the gough ball which is this big cylindrical facility it looks like a go off ball it was silver and it took the liquid waste from the inner reactor that was scoured from inside the pipes they would run acid inside these pipes because the al faw we collect on the inside of the pipes the our food reactor the pipes and create a neutron and pretty soon is too hot to be in the plant for workers and so they send acid wash through these pipes i pretty hot and it would go to the go off law every three months and it would feel up oh this golf ball was so hot that was a no fly zone over the top of this tank right and i had a big berm around it so we are going through this on this tour and there's that go off ball in the burbs except there's a gap in the berm where they've taken away some of the some of the dirt and you can see they go off i said wait a second what do you do when and i had a radiation detector with me and it went crazy think they stopped they said no to stop and you know so they they said what's wrong i said you don't even know that there's a huge radiation shine coming to your gap to go hullo no we didn't know that i said well you know you better know it now and where's my badge how much those did i just get right and then they drove drove into a parking lot to kind of and i said wait a second mike my detector is going off again and sure enough they parked next to these old sand filters and i said look just take me home i just i just want to go home thank you very much for the tour this is been very nice you know the idea that there'd be some pie in the sky land that wants to take temporary storage of high level nuclear waste is pie in the sky and no one's going to step forward and as many of you may have heard me you know a presentation at a presentation this is from it's extremely risky and it will kill people to move the high level waste and moving its weiss means twice as many die happily they disappear organizing and have both of our senators on board with these small modular reactors also signed a statement to that effect a good number of the state legislature legislators are behind it and there was you know when this was found out there was an effort to you know start push back the number of people who were signing on which was fairly successful by time it got to the house i guess so they didn't get as many as they had hoped but it's one of the things that we need to put on our agenda is challenging ensley and telling the legislator our decision makers no we don't need or want new nuclear technologies at hanford or anywhere else in the state it is not a clean renewable source of energy the small reactors create waste they have safety issues et etc you know there are proven technology i mean they shouldn't be there tri city says very excited about this it does have legs there are a lot of people pushing for it and they're smart enough to be pushing for it behind the scenes