Thanks (or maybe no thanks) to a deal struck by the federal government and the Washington state Attorney General’s Office, some 170 barrels of highly radioactive plutonium waste will be shipped from California and Ohio to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington beginning as early as next week. In exchange for being allowed to transport the waste, the feds promised to renegotiate the timeline for cleaning up Hanford and ultimately ship away at least twice as much waste as they are shipping in. Still, Hanford watchdog organizations called the arrangement between the Department of Energy and the state “a sucker deal,” in part because the outgoing waste will be less radioactive than the waste being brought in. Gerald Pollet, executive director of Heart of America Northwest, which focuses on Hanford cleanup and safety, said, “The bottom line [is], we’re taking the most deadly waste in exchange for a promise from the Department of Energy to do what they are legally required to do anyway.”
