The Graying of the Nuclear Age
OREGON LIVE
After all these years, the federal government owes an apology to Hanford critics
Saturday, March 4, 2000
IN MY OPINION
Craig A. PridemoreWho can forget the passionate days of idealistic youth?
Was it 1980 or 1981 when a group of young University of Washington students protested the accumulation of radioactive waste at Hanford? I don't recall now. Such is what the years do to idealism.
At the time, the newly formed Department of Energy, the Department of Defense and the nuclear industry called us liars and extremists. They said we were ignorant. Who, they asked, would believe our outlandish claims that they would ever put nuclear waste with a half-life of 10,000 years into tanks that would not last beyond 20?
A few days ago, I was invited to attend a meeting sponsored by some attractive young representatives of the DOE. Today, they would like for me to go out and explain to my community that there's a serious problem at Hanford.
It seems the tanks they stored nuclear waste in from 1944 until well into the 1970s began leaking in the late 1960s. Apparently, the tanks couldn't last beyond 20 years and, having contaminated the groundwater with more than a million gallons of nuclear waste, now risk leaking millions more into the Columbia River.
To be fair, these people sent by the agency weren't responsible for any of this. Today, maybe no one left at DOE is. Maybe no one ever was. The Cold War was paramount and nothing else mattered--certainly not a few hundred protesters.
Many of us in the early 1980s weren't objecting to nuclear weapons or nuclear power. We were objecting to the wholesale disregard for the nuclear waste that was accumulating at Hanford without any plan for what would become of it.
Passion, like idealism, subsides with time, of course. Over the years, we start to forget what it was like when we felt passionate about truth and justice, when we felt passionate about everything. We start to forget the pain we felt as young kids being called ignorant liars and extremists by our government.
The other day, those young people from DOE reminded me of that pain when they asked me to help them sell their plan for cleaning up Hanford. It's been a long time since I've felt so outraged. Twenty years later, they would like to use my hard-earned credibility to suffice for the fact that DOE doesn't have any left.
After decades of lying about my friends and me, and after ridiculing us before our communities, they asked me to go about enlisting my community's support for them. They asked me how they could get my community to look beyond blatant nuclear blackmail to step forward and do what needs to be done now that they have their fait accompli.
Well, DOE, how about starting by doing the one thing you didn't do the other day: Apologize.
To every man, woman and child who tried to tell the truth about what you were doing for so many years and who earned only your mendacity and dismissals: Apologize.
To every citizen in this country whose health, welfare and future you placed at risk and whose tax dollars you spent doing it: Apologize.
Don't come to someone like me with threats of nuclear blackmail. First do the one thing government rarely seems to have the moral courage to do: Apologize for lying and having been wrong.
After you've done that, come back and ask for my help again.
Then let's roll up our sleeves and get to work. You've again left us with one hell of a mess to clean up.
Craig A. Pridemore of Vancouver, Wash., is a Clark County commissioner.
Page Updated 3/08/00
