HANFORD NUCLEAR RESERVATION, Wash. - The first thing you notice at Hanford's SY Tank Farm Changing Trailer is the constant beeping. That sound will soon be drowned out by the shriek of masking tape being wrapped around every seam on the protective clothing.
"We go through a lot of tape here," says one of our monitors.
Photographer Pete Cassam and I have been warned of the dangers that await us inside the tank farm and accepted them. Now, we're pulling on cloth booties, cloth overalls, three layers of gloves, capped off at the feet and hands by thick rubber gloves and boots and topped off with safety glasses.
The process of dressing and undressing for a 20 minute visit inside the tank farm takes about an hour. Once inside, we're with workers who go through the process every day. They are working in an area covered by an invisible dust, described as being like baby powder that covers everything. Anything that touches it will not leave the reservation.
They work amid a lethal combination of radioactive and chemical contamination - the leftovers of a frantic effort to develop weapons for World War II and the Cold War. Today's frantic effort is to get it cleaned up before it can do any more damage to the environment, especially the Columbia River.
Once inside, we walk slowly over the tops of buried waste storage tanks. Most of them are old, single shelled and many are leaking now or will be if they can't be pumped out soon.
"We do know over time some of these tanks will leak. Some of them have leaked in the past," says Kent Smith, The C-Farm Retrieval and Closure Manager. "Over time, that will gravitate into the ground water and become a hazard to the Columbia River."
C Farm is currently under assault by workers on the outside and robotic power sprayers on the inside. The workers must install the sprayers through small pipes on top of the million gallon tanks that will unfold inside. They are then operated remotely from a control room a safe distance away. The sprayers pulverize the radioactive material that has firmed up to the consistency of peanut butter or harder. Once they get it into a more liquid form, they can pump it up to a mile away into safer double lined tanks.
There is no time to waste and no margin for error. As workers strip us down and check our clothing for nuclear contamination, we know we will soon be leaving the nation's most contaminated site, but thousands of workers will spend the next 30 years or more going through this process. By the time they are done, it will be nearly a century since the contamination of Hanford began.
