time once again for community form and we are very lucky to have with us live in the studio this morning christy by christy by is a university of washington professor in the department of global health and environmental and occupational health sciences and she is one of the co authors of the just released u n intergovernmental panel on climate change a special report on global warming of one point five degrees celsius kristie thank you very much for coming and spending time with us this morning thank you for having me so start out tell us what was the motivation in producing this latest report this is the very first report that the united nations framework convention climate change specifically asked the intergovernmental panel on climate change to produce there are thirty years of assessments produced under the united under the intergovernmental panel on climate change but this is the first time that this body was asked to produce an assessment specifically on the question of what are the risks of warming of one point five and two degrees celsius above pre industrial all right and so summarize for us what did you find there's a number of key findings the first is that climate change is already affecting people ecosystems and livelihoods so there's already impacts that can be observed and can be attributable to climate change the second is any additional unit of warming will it's projected doesn't have to be will is projected to c increased impacts so we'll see greater impacts at one point five degrees versus even greater impacts at two degrees so the risks continue to go up the risks don't necessarily go up linearly they can go up non linearly so the projections are increases in significant risks in many places for net for many systems another key message is there are literally thousands of options to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and to help individuals societies and nations better adapt to the projected risks and in fact if we take those actions i'll do these one at a time so if we take the actions to better adapt to a changing climate we can prevent some of the risks that are projected in other words they don't have to occur i'll give an example for that is heat waves result in deaths nobody has to die in a heat wave people do die in heat waves heat wave or early warning system save lives so if he waver early warning systems were more broadly deployed and if we did some work to make sure there uptake was better they'd be effective today and they would be affected with higher temperatures so there's lots of options available to reduce the risks the other part is reducing our greenhouse gas emissions so a key message from the report is it's urgent that we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and that the physics and the chemistry of how the climate system works means in fact we could keep collectively global mean surface temperature below one point five degrees celsius above pre industrial there's no constraints the constraints are political constraints on ensuring in fact that we reduce our emissions quite quickly that we transform our energy sector we rethink how we do transport in major cities the final part of that message is that for these mitigation options almost all of them have significant health care benefits reducing emissions out of tailpipes reducing emissions out of coal fired power plants it takes particles out of the air seven million people worldwide die every year from air pollution so if we could reduce these emissions we would benefit our health now and we would ensure that the climate doesn't warm as much as it's projected to free continue to make those emissions so up to this point we been looking at a one degree celsius increase since industrial revolution that's right we've already the world's already increased one degree and of course it's one degree averaged around the world it doesn't mean it's one degree everywhere so parts of the world have warmed significantly more than one degree and parts of not warmed as much that's also true for the projections so when you're looking at projections of an increase of one point five degrees celsius above pre industrial the arctic is g to warm a lot more than that but parts of the ocean won't warm as much so there is a lot of variability in what the local temperature changes are projected to be so just based on the the one degree increase so far which i guess was what the bulk of your data would have been using yes what have we seen within that that you know it already find significant or disturbing we're already seeing increases in the frequency and intensity and duration of extreme events particularly heat waves there's been a lot of discussion about hurricanes and how hurricanes are changing because ocean temperatures are higher that hurricanes draw their energy from the temperature of the ocean so we're seeing people dying in heat waves we're seeing vector borne diseases change their range we're seeing die off in some ecosystems we're seeing places where it's much more difficult for people to achieve their livelihoods parts of the low and middle income countries where it's becoming hotter and drier the crop production is falling which makes it more difficult then of course for people to make the money they need to make to feed their families and buy their inputs for agriculture so there's lots of changes taking place on land acidification we're seeing significant changes in corals so there's a quite a broad range of changes that have already occurred with a one degree increase in global mean surface temperature and we see regularly in the in the media and corporate media what many would perceive to be tied to the climate change the increase in temperature so how do you factor in when this large body of scientists that you had co author well participate in this report instances where let's say with vector borne diseases changes in that based on the change in temperature verse is just human interaction that's a good question it's very complicated to do that there is a field called detection an attribution where people do exactly what that implies they detect whether there's been a change from a baseline it's easier with our weather observations because it's easier to construct baselines it's more difficult when you're thinking about for example malaria changing its range because what is the baseline  there's a lot of work that has to be done around looking at baselines and if you do see a change from the baseline then what portion of that change could be due to climate change versus better malaria control programs versus other kinds of interventions so for some areas it's more difficult because of this complex interaction of factors in other areas it's a bit easier particularly when you're looking at a rare disease for example and seeing a sudden shift in that disease that you can directly attribute to a change from temperature a couple of years ago the are the baltic warmed just phenomenally parts of the baltic anyway they had not seen cases or if they had seen cases or very small numbers and they saw much larger numbers of cases all the way up towards the arctic circle in places that you would never expect that you would see this it's because the temperature in the baltic was so high that these organisms could replicate so you do you have many places where you can say yes climate change did contribute and others where it's consistent with what you expect but yet you don't have quite enough data to take a look at the various interacting factors so talk about the increase when you talk about heat waves and the increase in temperature obviously that's going to fact that the land itself as it gets warmer than we have less it retains less water and moisture it right what happens is warmer air holds more and so when you don't have rain that warmer air pulls moisture out of the soil which is how you then get drought but when it rains you see heavier precipitation of events in the u s there's already been more than a twenty percent increase in heavy precipitation events it's not that it's raining more often it's raining harder i've only lived in seattle for a few years and i've listened to many people of the last few years talk about these unprecedented heavy rainfall events that's exactly what you expect with a change in climate so you see both more floods and more droughts which we are seeing examples of again as you say just here in seattle yeah more heavy downpours hotter stretches during the summer and we can expect more of that just i mean we're seeing more of it we can expect more of that what's the your predictions again for when we hit to potentially with if we don't change now the both the one point five and two point zero increase because there's uncertainty in the climate system there's a range so the projection for when the global mean surface temperature could reach one point five ranges from twenty thirty to twenty fifty two so you know somewhere in the twenty thirty days twenty four days is when it's projected the global warming that much assuming we continue our emissions at the same rate and then two degrees is highly variable when the projections for two degrees if we don't reduce our emissions than we could see that not long after we see one point five if you think today we've increased one degree and we're talking about increasing by half a degree in potentially as little as twenty years than another half degree could be twenty years after that so very close in time if we do reduce our emissions we may never hit two degrees we could push that out well past twenty one hundred at the same time it's important to remember that most of the energy what we're doing with the mission emitting greenhouse gases is we're putting energy into the climate system and most of that energy is going into the oceans and so the oceans are taking up most of this energy and as a result sea level rise will continue for thousands of years so we can take action to reduce our global mean surface temperature sea level rise is just going to continue and if the oceans are taking the brunt of this and most of it will be below the surface we're actually not seeing a lot of what is happening currently that's correct there's a lot of research going on in understanding what's going on in the oceans how the temperature is just shifting what that means for corals what that means for fisheries so touch on the increase in heat how that affects both humans but it greatly effects animals  as well as insects it does indeed there was a recent paper came out showing a big decline in many insect populations jew probably to temperature bits for some of the species that may be because there's also changes in the humidity but it's a temperature driven response so yes we're seeing declines i can remember as a child driving across the midwest and having to stop regularly clean off your windscreen because of all the bugs and how they're used to be car washes where people advertise they would clean all the bugs off the grill in the front of the car we don't have that anymore so there has been a decline in minutes it is a simple example it doesn't prove but there has been a decline in a lot of and a lot of the insects that we rely on there's of course a lot of concerns about the bee so there's lots of changes going on that are being measured that aren't directly consequence of the change in climate and a lot of people don't take into account that insects are actually key in the whole pollination of plants they are indeed you can't get the plants very few plants self pollinate they need something to help them with the pollination process and those somethings are insects and be right so and then it obviously isn't go affect animals and some of those are in addition to being we perceive as just being there for our our visual entertainment right and some of them are our animals we consume and are quite critical to the ecosystem as well that's correct there's been a big changes in animals everybody knows about the polar bears and with permafrost they're just losing the land that they need to be able to maintain their lives that you now see these photographs of polar bears that are incredibly skinny because they just can't get enough to eat but it's also affecting the domestic animals and as a proud range of issues we talked about heat for a little bit turns out chickens don't like heat very much so if chickens are not kept in air conditioned environments when there's heat waves mortality in chickens can be quite high there's also a different mechanism that's going on that the carbon dioxide we're emitting itself is affecting our plants so this is separate from the temperature change there's different categories of plants in terms of how they take carbon out of the atmosphere and use it to to grow and there's a category of plants that include most of the cereal crops rely on particularly rice sweet potatoes and as the carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere the way these plants respond physiologically results in the plants having less protein they have less  micronutrients and they have less b vitamins so the nutritional quality of the plants is going down it's really important for low and middle income countries countries like bangladesh even as they developing today three of four calories comes from reiss there's about eight hundred twenty million people in the world who are food insecure there's about two billion who are micronutrient deficient particularly iron in sync and iron in zinc is going down in the plants and of course we feed many of these plants to the animals we rely on for food and so the micro nutrients come directly from the plants so they're there's research going on showing in fact that cattle are changing in response to changes in in their diet there's some plants are not being affected as much but there are consequences throughout the food chain not just for what we you know the the bagel or the don't you had for breakfast but also what it means for what the animals are eating and then how nutritious they are to provide whatever we need as humans in terms of micronutrients and b vitamins and protein so you have been working on this issue for a long time like least twenty years is that right more than twenty years yes so put it in perspective for us where we are right now how bad things are how bad things are in terms of of  of our soil in the nest in the chance to fix the nest we have soiled reports have been coming out for thirty years on the challenges of climate change this report is a different as i said because it was asked for by governments it also asked the scientific community to frame our questions differently than was done in the past so when you look at the research that was done prior to this report mostly people looked at one of the potential consequences in twenty thirty twenty fifty twenty one hundred so is looking at time and this report said specifically we want to look at temperature change they are of course related but it does give you a different perspective on the research that has been done in terms of the immediacy because we now have stronger more robust projections of when we could hit twenty one point five degree c in the twenty thirty's twenty forty's and so it does give you a greater sense of the urgency of the challenge it very clearly lays out the magnitude of that challenge and all of the options that can help us address the challenge one of the really gratifying parts of last week in incheon south korea was the process to produce this report as a scientist write the chapters the scientists then draft what's called the summary for policymakers and when we met in incheon there was about one hundred forty governments present and you literally go through the summary for policymakers line by line sentence by sentence you put up the first sentence fifteen flags come up and governments say i don't understand this or government say in this chapter on this page on this line number is a point that's really important for my government could we incorporate that in there and so you sit and negotiate you work directly with the governments to ensure that the summary for policymakers is consistent with the underlying science but also written in a way that's useful for them as they go back and work on developing their policies so it's a very intense week and very very strong and very positive engagement from the world governments because they wanted the summary for policymakers to go back to their prime minister to their ministry of the environment to their parliament to say here's what this report says and this is what we will need to do as you go through this approval session each sentence is agreed to by consensus every government s off on every sentence and so in the end the summary for policymakers is that there document we're happy with the science it's completely consistent with what we have in the report and it's phrased in a way that they can use to promote policy and that kind of co production of a document for policy makers is fascinating and a real privilege to be part of can the hundred forty governments that participated in this program carry this on their own or don't we need the other fifty the chose not to yes uno that before greenhouse gas emissions the level one missions is not the same everywhere so there's a few countries that really urgent simply need to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions if one country chooses not to then that means other countries need to up ambition but don't forget we're focusing here on national governments but look at what's going on in the states in the u s and in cities california governor brown just committed to significantly reducing their emissions over a couple of decades we've got a ballot initiative coming up so the states are taking a lot of action and that is true in every country so you see a diversity across different scales of governance and yes we do collectively need to reduce our emissions but i do a lot of work in small island states their toll emissions are not very much the other part of this is every country's got to work on adaptation because every country is being affected they have to be much better prepared look at all the disasters we've seen this year and last year so every country needs to work on that part of the negotiations under the united nations framework convention on climate change is on providing funding for low and middle income countries to help them adapt better they didn't cause this problem their emissions are quite low so equity underlies this very very strongly and this document will go to the next meeting of the united nations framework convention on climate change in december and will feed into all of those negotiations around what's called loss and damage around funding for adaptation around the level of national ambition for mitigation reduction so in addition to a very busy week that you had  dealing with the release of this this report and your peers i know that you've doing been doing a lot of media outreach media reaching to you so what is your sense of how  the rest the world has taken this report versus the u s acceptance or non acceptance of it across the world the media interest has been extraordinary which is fabulous so everyone i know is giving lots of media interviews which is great we really appreciate the interest in the report when we all left korea coauthors my colleagues many of them flew back straight to their countries and went into meetings with their parliament with their prime ministers with their ministers of the environment ministers of energy whatever the various departments were to present the report talk about the findings to talk about what needs to change in terms of their policies so we're seeing very high uptake from many countries in terms of policy interest we'll see what happens in terms of how long it takes for th time i would characterize all of the authors i don't know whether they'd characterize themselves of this as worried optimists we're not paid to do this report we have no compensation i estimate i probably put two thousand hours into this report these are nights and weekends and everyone put in those kinds of hours and we did it because we're concerned deeply concerned about what is going on with respect to climate change and we have optimism that there is a possibility if there is enough collective political will that we can avert many of the disastrous projections that are out there if you're too optimistic you wouldn't want to spend a lot of time working out a report like this and if you're a pessimist you wouldn't actually want to engage in this report either so you need that combination of deep deep concern and some optimism that in fact this information can make a difference and finally really quickly what would you recommend to listeners to do based on what you found out  of things that people can do the simple things of thinking about your energy usage turning out the lights every parent says that about oh about a million times to children saves you money reduces energy consumption unplug phone chargers when you're not using them because they draw energy but your computer to sleep when you're not using it there's lots of ways she can reduce your energy consumption save you money it will be good for the planet increase your own awareness understand the range of possibilities for reducing your emissions and then one of the most important things is we have an election next month and if this matters to you just like any issue that matters to you then vote for people who will try and put the policies in place that we're going to need to address a changing climate time once again for community form and we're very lucky to have back with us live in the studios this morning tom carpenter tom carpenter is executive director of the hanford challenge and here to talk about developments that have happened  hanford since we spoke to him this last spring of this year tom thank you very much for coming in spend time with us again this morning always great to be here thanks mike so start out tell us about for those unfamiliar tell us briefly about what his hands are challenge for challenges is an organization that conducts oversight at the hanford nuclear site hanford made plutonium for the u s nuclear weapons arsenal from world war two up until the mid one nine hundred eighty s and left behind the most contaminated facility in the united states and one of the top contaminated facilities in the world it two thirds of the nation's high level nuclear waste is stored there most of the radioactive waste that's called low level waste is stored at this site you know as taxpayers were spending billions and billions of dollars just caretaking the site and a little bit toward cleanup so this this site was born in secrecy it was conducted its business outside the view of the public which is how it got to be the most environmentally dangerous site in the nation and it needs oversight so that's what we do we work a lot with whistleblowers at the site we work on behalf of workers who are getting sick from exposures there  and we try to intervene so that it's a safe and effective cleanup and one that this region deserves so when the clean up is over we've got a site that is going to protect current and future generations so this week you had a major victory in making it safer for the cleanup operations can you talk about that yeah so for the last couple of decades we've been studying the fact that workers at the site especially around the what are called the tank farms they've got these big vats of high level waste in these underground nuclear waste tanks each tank holds up two million gallons and they've got some fifty six million gallons stored underground well the workers are on top of these tanks since they're underground and they have openings the tanks have openings to the air because they have to vent because they pressur and the vapors in gases that come out of these tanks can make people sick they have toxic chemicals in those vapors there's radioactive materials in those vapors and  of the radioactive materials are filtered out but a lot of the chemicals are not are not filtered out and so workers who have been inhaling these toxic vapors on occasion have gotten very sick have every year there'd be anywhere from fifty to one hundred exposures requiring medical visits a certain percentage of these faults suffered permanent long term damage which mostly came in the in the form of either lung damage or neurological damage so people get brain damage from a handling these chemicals there's over fifteen hundred chemicals documented in these papers and some of them were dangerous at very low levels well we made a fuss about this in two thousand and three our organization put out a report called no in danger it because they i knew that from their own internal studies that these vapors and these chemicals were dangerous to the workers in fact we underwrote the study that showed that from one tank there was a cancer risk a fatal cancer risk of one in ten  from workers who have a single exposure they buried that study but we made sure that study saw the light of day so working around the havard site clean up nuclear waste should be a death sentence for workers and we should this report got the attention of the attorney general at the time christine gregoire she conducted her own independent investigation which caused the department of energy which investigations which is great because they can all watch each other they're kind of like you know will they find something we don't they came out with an expert set of reports that said yeah this stuff is very dangerous and you need to do something about it two thousand and four was when those reports came out validating our work and they put workers on supplied air at the time and you know protected them but a year and a half later they were back to just regular t shirts and  no respiratory protection and the exposures happened again so we came down on him again and we negotiated basically a an agreement twice two times that they would do better at protecting these workers that there would be more transparency every time the new administrations would come in new companies would come in new company officials and all that would slip away and they're back to exposing workers well in two thousand and fourteen final you know this whole new set of exposures happened by this time we were sick and tired of it and we approached a union at the site the pipefitters union local five ninety eight  called united association and i wrote a nice letter to the attorney general bob ferguson who had just been elected and i said you know hey these people are getting exposed and sick and half or doesn't want to do anything about it everything we've tried and here are some twenty different experts studies showing how you know these are dangerous and hanford ignores it that resulted in us deciding to file a lawsuit and we gave them plenty of warning and in twenty fifteen we actually filed that lawsuit september we litigated that for three years it was we went through discovery we went through a motion for a preliminary injunction we won several important victories from the judge and that motion identified that these papers are covered under the environmental laws and one in particular called records and that these papers were causing health damage that the state of washington in particular had standing to sue and that we could proceed with our lawsuit so they had the government attempted to dismiss it all and it didn't work that led to settlement talks and finally this past wednesday we announced that we had arrived at a settlement agreement  with at the attorney general's office we had a press conference with the union and for challenge in the attorney general it's a fifty page agreement we are not dropping the lawsuit the lawsuit is on administrative hold and hanford asked to go through a lot of work to make sure that people are protected as they work to install a system that captures and treats these vapors so that by the time you you know is air to the workforce it is clean safe to breathe so that is a system that will probably take until twenty twenty one to complete you know and install and all that we will be monitoring with our own experts in that process there are set up deadlines and if at any part of the process the department of energy or the contractors fail to honor their end of the agreement we can revive that lawsuit and  go to the judge and ask for that relief but if we can get we get them to agree to it and we've won everything we would have gotten in the agreement that we probably would have won any decision  then why not so that's why we came to the agreement one of the the mind bending issues that effects the decisions and your work at hanford as as well it as at other facilities is always that when you try and challenge the government whether it's federal or whichever it's the taxpayers that end up paying footing the bill for the defense of these contractors and the federal government if they had just done the right thing and they would have spent all this money on external law firms fighting us discovery costs they had to do it all anyway right they had to put all the protections in place so i don't get it either but that seems to be the only thing that actually works to persuade the government to do something they should have done years and years and years ago which is put in a system that captures in trees the vapors to protect their own workers and it took a lawsuit to do it and again it took a lawsuit to force hanford to treat the waste in the first place and remove it from the site which they haven't done yet but it's and then when they fail fall you know they've been sued again and again by the state of washington to meet deadlines and they have to redo the deadlines because they fail despite the amounts of money going into it it cetera so hanford is a puzzle it's a challenge you know for this for this region it takes a lot of work and fortunately we do have a state attorney general who is pretty hardcore about hannover and you know he's the real deal when it comes to making sure  that hanford lives up to its obligations and does things that are protecting the workers out there he's got out there four or five times met with workers got done town hall meetings has you know showed up at the press conferences and prosecuted the suit with all due diligence which is one of the reasons that we came to an agreement yeah when you said hanford's a puzzle it reminded me of that little puzzle from the from the series hell hanford that they could just make their problems go away by putting another name on it and in this case high level waste is a very long lived and fiercely nuclear waste that's some of the worst stuff on the planet right this is the same stuff generating the chemicals that are hurting the workers it doesn't this waste some of it contains constituents that last maybe millions of years in toxicity and microscopic levels and you can't neutralize it right it just is it has to decay away at its own rate of speed plutonium we've heard of there's a lot of waste that has a half life of twenty four thousand years it takes ten half life's work to go away so that's a quarter million of years years it's whatever container you put this in it will escape that attack container and it when it hits the river systems when it hits crops the water table the soil then it starts circulating through the environment and causes damage it's  and there's stretch of ninety and all of our teeth and all of our bones from atomic testing just for instance because it acts like calcium so letting this stuff get out into the environment is a very bad idea hanford is dynamically geographic area right so it's there's volcanoes nearby there's a major river system that runs through the columbia river through the site the most power second most powerful river in the united states tanks the department of energy under the trump administration has now said well it's pretty you know if we really label the high level waste then we don't have to clean it up if we could just leave it there in the tanks and dumb concrete on it and walk away because low level waste you're allowed to put that and was called shallow land burial and just leave so they came out with this official proposal on june fourth and they're starting with saying that they're going to leave four percent of the waste in these tanks called the sea foreign tanks as about sixty thousand plus gallons of high level waste some of it in liquid form in these tanks at the bottom of these tanks that they say they can't get out of the tanks easily or or you know reasonably financially reasonably we're saying no you got to go get it right and they're saying no our proposal is we're going to dump concrete on top of it and we're done we're going to close the tanks and they're going to do that with the other seventeen tank farms at the hanford site they are planning to leave millions of gallons of high level waste stuck in these tanks and they've also said that waste that they've dumped to the soils from these tanks which is if you add it all up it's hundreds of millions of gallons also will be subject to this relabeling so it's no longer high level waste it's low level wast well imagine if you're playing a game of football and the opposing team said well we just move the goal post over the the football at the fifty yard line we have a touchdown it's like no you can't do that that's against the rules well this is the same thing is the law requires that high level waste be removed treated and sent to a deep geological repository which is well below the water table and we don't have one of those yet we're working on building that in the meantime this waste has to be safeguarded and make sure you know made sure that it's not mixing with the environment so this is a fight on our hands we are ready to bring litigation to force the trump administration to back away from this plan we think we would win that fight if they actually decide to go forward with that proposal we are also though working politically with the state of washington with you know our own delegation you know our senators other groups the tribes so we've all come together and said you know this this has to be stopped so the ac indian nation heart of america northwest columbia river keeper hanford challenge and other groups have met and were strategizing and getting ready to do what's necessary there will be hearings  seattle in mid october we don't know exactly where or when but will keep key people apprise you can check our website hanford challenge dot org i'm sure heart of america will have it on their website et c so that the public can come out and lodge their protest we're also having a comment writing happy hour at our office on next thursday the twenty seventh and thursday evening from four to six at our office in madison park at the corner of martin luther king and madison street twenty seven one thousand madison so we're inviting the public to comment you know have a beer and write a comment a way to do that other groups can be riverkeeper also has that app they are politicians need to hear that this is a bad idea in our organization we're throwing everything we've got at this  because game over on him for cleanup if they just end up leaving high level waste buried in the tanks at the hanford site without cleaning it up now how can the feds do that it's if they are bound by the tri party agreement if the other two parties don't go along well that's that's a very good question and the tri party agreement where the state's authority comes they're allowed to regulate the chemical constituents and the radioactive waste  they're not allowed to or regulate the radioactivity that's only for the feds to self regulate so the state of washington is able to say well from the perspective of the chemicals in this waste you've got to do this and this and this but the radioactivity the plutonium and the technique and the iodine one twenty nine some of these really long live products the state of washington cannot regulate those those ways by federal law because of exemptions in the atomic energy act which we like to see go away and we're working on trying to get congress to change that law so that the states have more authority to regulate radioactive waste just like they do other hassid hazardous regulation and you know i think we do have hooks we are waiting for the state of washington to come out swinging on this we're counting on them to do that i think they're pretty scared from a political point of view  of you know the consequences of offending the federal government and you know how that might affect the money for the clean up into the future which i think is of valid concern and i'm fully expecting them to say no to this and i think they will i think they also just are being careful but the governor governor inslee needs to hear how people feel about leaving hanford you know a high level waste repository in all but name renaming high  waste to make it low level waste and leaving this long live stuff there is just not cool you cannot do that so the federal government clarify for me the federal government itself doesn't really have my impression is they don't really have workers out there they have some administrative people isn't it the contractors that would actually if they did that wouldn't it be the contractors and the contracting companies that would carry out those orders oh sure yeah the federal government hires companies you know backed all as one a company called w r p s washington river protection solutions these are kind of frankenstein companies they're like parts of this company part of that company stock together and suddenly they're now i'll see a limited liability corporation so you know if they get sued they just only the assets of that l l c are at risk and so this is how business is conducted at the hampered the lowest bid gets the job and then they just jack up the prices and afterwards and say well you know it's going to cost more so now you've got the the waste treatment plant which is supposed to treat the waste in these tanks and mix it with glass the original conception of that was it would cost the bid said will spend four point six billion dollars to build this facility and then run it starting the year two thousand and seven well it's two thousand and eighteen they won't even announce what it's going to cost at this point the government accountability office g a o has tag it at nineteen billion dollars insiders say no it to be thirty billion it may be a lot more than that just to build it and then another forty billion to operate it so you know we're talking real money here and this is one of the reasons that they don't want to do the glass and they want to use concrete because it's expensive and hard to to do it right well you know the headline is this we spent as americans seven the nine trillion dollars according to the brookings institution to make nuclear weapons that's in today's dollars so up to nine trillion dollars to make the warheads and we're going to spend a couple of hundred billion on cleaning up the mess but that that money is to protect not only the river and current residents around their emporio and by the way  know which is downstream but the whole region because this stuff if it goes airborne you're looking at a fukushima or journal like accident right and more importantly future generations right one hundreds of generations into the future will be affected by this and if we don't clean up that mess and it's always cheaper to clean it up and prevent the release than trying to clean up afterwards just asked japan  or just ask the soviet union which went bankrupt trying to clean up after the churn oval accident which you know cost about five hundred billion dollars to you know clean up and of course they left a huge they didn't clean it up right there is several hundred square miles of permanently uninhabitable land saying with fukushima is it's going to be lots and lots of uninhabitable land and it's still spewing out hundreds of tons of radioactive water right into the pacific ocean every day eight years later we're still looking at an accident that is out of control so hanford is in the same condition of you know one point governor locke called hanford and underground sure noble and he was right this is one of the worst radioactive disasters to afflict the united states and we're not looking at it that way because it's in tanks it's in the soil and you know it doesn't get the headlines but it is a an existential threat to this region and to everyone who lives around here and everyone who will live here  this waste and trying to make it go away and putting concrete on top of it making it even harder to clean up down the road i mean we can probably all survive the trump administration in the idiot decisions they they end up making here but why make it harder for future administrations to come and do the right thing which is what they're proposing to do is dump thousands of tons of concrete on top of this waste making it almost impossible not only to clean up the waste in these tanks but to get taxpayer so anyway that's that's what we're about and we're hoping that people can go to our web site learn about this it's hampered challenge dot award she heart of america has its website clemmie riverkeeper we're all looking at this there's even that department ecologies washington state has good fact sheets on this but if you go to hanford challenge dot org you'll get a gateway to a lot of information and we are organizing on this we about this the department of energy has been compelled to put on a public hearing they said no it took both our senators and oregon senators to put pressure on him to even have a public meeting you know and they haven't even said when it's going to be yet there's one in portland on october sixteenth for anyone listening who is in portland check with columbia river keeper on the time and place for that kind of an all day meeting and then up a public meeting in the evening  where people can lodge their comments and then there'll be one in seattle probably the next day the seventy yabut is the one in portland is that going to actually be hearing where people get to do testimony or is going to be one of those dog and pony shows where they put out some cookies and some flyers on a table and then let you sign up for you on their e mail list probably that what you just said but we will definitely be organized and ready with you know computers and cards and ways to comment and again we are putting pressure on the department of energy you know for hearings so that they people can give oral comments there we could maybe set up a video we could do some video comments and oral comments too even if they don't to hear them at that site we can just collect those instant on in all right and real quickly because we only have like a minute left but again it was your organization that helped whistleblowers who were working on the  classification project that was going to be the solution who courageously came forward and pointed out that they were like building this thing and it wasn't going to work and we were looking at potential like nuclear explosions in night that would have happened had you not made a stink about it right now yeah the facility they were designing and building had a risk of hydrogen gas explosions and nuclear criticality s and you think that their internal experts saying hey guess what this could happen would be enough but no they fired those people for saying that so they needed a legal strategy which we gave them and a strategy in congress and with the public i mean we had to go you know on rachel ma show usa today having a really go all out to get the word out about this and finally you know got the the secretary of energy to acknowledge oh yeah they're right you know put this plan you know suspended you know the design and you know go back to the drawing board and we are in favor of classifying the waste but not at the cost of risky nuclear explosions and you know contaminate a large area of land i mean you're trying to clean up the waste here so nuclear safety is number one you have to you have to protect the public you have to protect the workers as you do this very tough cleanup well with that we are in for stay on a time i want to thank you very much for come and spend t