BOSTON: Okay, let me start with a little history of the Hanford site. The Hanford site was established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project, which was the government's project to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. As part of that project, nine nuclear reactors here at Hanford took uranium and enriched it and made plutonium. I should have said it took uranium and activated it to make plutonium. That plutonium was then separated out and sent to Rocky Flats or other places to be incorporated into weapons.

To get the plutonium out of the spent fuel, the fuel was separated and the waste products from the fuel went into underground storage tanks, so we now have 54 million gallons of high level radioactive waste, more high level radioactive waste than anybody else in the DOE complex. We also have more spent nuclear fuel than anyplace else in the DOE complex. There are a number of facilities that took the uranium that was sent to us from Frenold, Ohio, and fashioned it into fuel rods that go into the reactors. So we have a series of almost 90 buildings that are contaminated with uranium and with various chemicals, much like the Frenold site in Ohio.

As a result of all the activities here, although this is a desert, over the years, over 400 billion gallons of liquids were discharged to the surface of the desert, raising the water table some 20 to 40 feet. So although it is a desert, contaminants have been driven to the ground water where, today, there's over 100 square miles of contaminated ground water underneath the Hanford site.

As a result of all these activities, we have a diverse array of environmental challenges. Really, all of the challenges that you find at other sites in the DOE complex are found here at Hanford. The challenge today is how to go about those one at a time to address it.

The things we've done first are those things that are first needed to protect the public, the workers and the environment. So we've addressed safety issues related to the underground storage tanks, issues that would prevent a tank from exploding. There are flammable gases produced in these tanks. Flammable gases like hydrogen, so we now have controls in place that would prevent hydrogen generation and keep any sparking or flames or any ignition sources far away from those tanks. So we've addressed those types of issues and have many of them under control.

We've ceased releases to the soils and we've ceased releases to the environment, aside from where there are state issued environmental permits. We're working on moving spent nuclear fuel, 2,100 tons of spent nuclear fuel, this is again more than anyplace else in the complex, moving that away from the river, up to our central plateau, where it can be safely stored until it's sent to the national repository. So step by step, we're addressing the complex cleanup challenges.

CALLISON: What's the story with the state Department of Ecology?

BOSTON: Okay, the state Department of Ecology, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy have a triparty agreement, a federal facilities agreement by which we regulate and map out the cleanup strategy for the Hanford site. These sites have cleanup challenges and so are not in compliance today with all of the federal environmental regulations. So we've mapped out a plan to both clean up the environment and come into compliance with regulations for ongoing activities.

As part of that plan, we lay out milestones or dates by which various cleanup activities or compliance activities will be completed. Through time, as new work comes in, we have new challenges we have to take on as part of the cleanup mission or we run into unforeseen circumstances or our funding provided by Congress isn't as great as we would have anticipated, we have a need to change our plans. And we've been successful in the past adjusting our plans by working with our regulators.

In recent years, we've had a challenge having enough money to meet all of our out-year commitments. And so our current challenge has to do with how the regulators will hold the Department of Energy accountable for out-year commitments. We want to be accountable for our out-year commitments because we're serious about this environmental cleanup. The challenges, however, we run into technical problems, we run into contractual problems from time to time and we run into funding problems from time to time as we go into flat funding and other issues come up across the DOE complex. We don't always get all the money we would like to accelerate Hanford cleanup and so there's a need to renegotiate.

Our current disagreement, the primary issue is how we go about those renegotiations and how we're held accountable for cleanup at this site for our out-year milestones. I want to make clear that the Environmental Restoration Agency -- I'm sorry, Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Ecology have been good partners and we've worked together very well under this triparty agreement.

CALLISON: Can I just get you to say that last sentence without your stutter, just because I think that's important.

BOSTON: Yeah, okay. I wanted to make it clear that the Environmental Protection Agency and the Washington State Department of Ecology have worked very effectively with the Department of Energy to push Hanford cleanup forward, we've been good partners. Working with them, we've met over 95 percent of our triparty agreement milestones. Although we've faced a number of challenges, we've made a tremendous amount of progress working together and we anticipate that we'll be able to resolve our current dispute and again work together very effectively.

CALLISON: I guess that logically puts us into how long will it take to clean up the reservation and what are the cost estimates?

BOSTON: The Hanford Reservation is 560 square miles with nine nuclear reactors and four big isotope processing buildings, 177 large up to a million gallon underground storage tanks. It's going to take a long time to clean up all of these problems. We believe in the next 15 years, we'll have the vast majority of the issues resolved and the issues that will take the longest to close are the underground storage tanks, which may take another 20, 30 years or longer to remove the waste and process it, turning it into glass, where it can be safely stored and disposed.

We also have to deal with the almost 100 square miles of contaminated ground water and that's going to be a significant challenge to mitigate that ground water issue. So we anticipate that waste treatment, storage and disposal activities will be ongoing here for at least the next 40 years, after which there will probably be some period of long-term stewardship for part of the site.

We also anticipate in the next 15 years or so, much of this reservation, or say 500 square miles of the 560 total, could be made available for other uses. That is, the Department of Energy could have cleaned up enough of the reservation to release to the river corridor the undisturbed section of the Columbia River and pull back to about a 20 square mile, 20 to 50 square mile area where we would do our ongoing treatment, storage and disposal operations.

CALLISON: I'm just trying to remember if you addressed the cost issue.

BOSTON: We'll get the costs, okay.

CALLISON: I'm intrigued by what you said about not getting enough funding to __________ at some point, so I'm trying to figure out how that -- what's the cost,(inaudible), whether or not you expect that you're going to run into budgeting problems.

BOSTON: Okay, let me talk about that. I said we'd be here for the next 40 to 50 years working on the cleanup, after which there would be a period of long-term stewardship. One of the challenges that we have is enough capital dollars, enough money up front to build some of the large facilities we need to deal with, say, the high level radioactive waste in the 177 underground storage tanks. Again, we have 54 million gallons of high level radioactive waste, much, much more than anybody else in the country. We have to build facilities that will cost billions of dollars to build and then will cost billions of dollars to operate over many years. The total cleanup estimate for the Hanford site is estimated to be on the order of 40 to 50 billion dollars.

Having the dollars available up front to make the investment for timely construction, so we don't have to build a facility over 15 years, but you can reasonably build it over three or four years, is going to require a significant investment in Hanford.

Now currently, we have a cleanup budget of over a billion dollars a year, which seems like a lot of money, but with all of the challenges we have, the reactors, the spent fuel, the ground water, all of the cleanup challenges we have, it still isn't enough to build some of the large facilities that we need, so we're going to need even more money to get the facilities in place so we have the capability to treat the tank waste and to close out those tank farms and get on with the cleanup here.

CALLISON: How does Hanford compare to the other sites, cleanupwise?

BOSTON: In comparison to the other sites, Hanford is a much more complex cleanup challenge than just about any other site. As I said, we have more reactors, more spent fuel, more plutonium, about as much contaminated ground water. It's just terribly complex, more high level waste than anybody else, so it's a very big challenge.

We're fortunate in that after Savannah River, we probably have the largest increment of funding in the DOE complex. Still and all, it's a challenge to keep our cleanup commitments and to stay on schedule with the budgets we have.

Years ago, when we first established our triparty agreement for Hanford cleanup, we anticipated annual budgets almost twice as large as in fact they are today. This is all before the balanced budget, before there was flat funding, so we anticipated our cleanup budgets would continue to rise and as you may be aware, they haven't for the last several years, and so that's causing us to recast out plans.

CALLISON: I know there seems to be quite a bit of disagreement, depending on who you ask, whether or not there's contaminants seeping into the river and if so, how much. So I'm curious, what is the threat to the Columbia River if there is any? And also, if you could combine that into whether or not Hanford poses any current health issues.

BOSTON: Let me talk about releases of contaminants from the Hanford site to the Columbia River and to the surrounding environs and put that in context of what type of risk or hazard that may present.

There are contaminants leaving the Hanford site that are reaching the Columbia River and have been almost since the very beginning of Hanford operations. When there were early reactor operations, waste disposal sites near the river resulted in some contaminants reaching the river. Today, there is chromium reaching the river from old disposal sites, there's strontium 90, radioactive strontium reaching the river. There's tritium reaching the river.

We do a lot of monitoring in the river and say how much, how much has it increased the concentrations in the river and could that be hazardous to people and could it be hazardous to aquatic life. And the answer is no, we don't believe so, the concentrations really are quite low. There's a tremendous dilution in the Columbia River and that dilution really dilutes these contaminants down to levels where we don't believe they have any significance in the river water. The tritium can be measured in the river water and some of the other constituents can be measured in the ground water entering the river, so we know it's getting into the river.

There's concern about the salmon, the salmon eggs in the bottom of the river, where strontium or chromium may be coming up. And so the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory conducts studies of the salmon in the river and looks at salmon eggs and looks at potential impacts on those eggs. And so far, we haven't seen anything, but we do continue to look.

But contaminants absolutely have and do continue to reach the river. We're doing a lot to mitigate that, there are no direct releases to the river. But as a result of past waste disposal practices, contaminants are still reaching the river.

What about the surrounding community and how should the people around us feel about the Hanford operation, especially now that we're in a cleanup mode and not a production mode? Before we clean up any area, we do an intensive evaluation of what are the hazards, what could go wrong, how could, first, workers be exposed, and then what sort of accidents could occur that could release contaminants of any type into the environment? How might they affect on-site workers, how might they affect the public? And then we put a series of controls in place to protect our workers, protect the environment and protect the public and protect on-site workers.

How do we know that it works? Well, we do a lot of monitoring on a job. So if we're in an old building and we're cleaning out a hot cell that's got a lot of radioactivity in it, there's a tremendous amount of monitoring that goes on to ensure, first, that the workers are safe. There are controls put in place to make sure there can be no explosions or no releases of that material to the environment.

So there's monitoring inside the buildings, there's monitoring around the workers, there's controls in place. We do a lot of monitoring on the site. There's monitoring at the site boundaries, there's monitoring of the air in the middle of the site, there's monitoring there off the site. There's monitoring of the Columbia River, there's monitoring of the ground water, there's monitoring of soils, of vegetation. And all of that information is released to the public annually, so we can confidently say that the public is not being impacted by Hanford operations. Again, those data are available to the public.

Where we do have releases to the environment today, aside from the in the past practice waste sites, but where stacks are emitting materials or there are discharges to the river from treatment plants, those discharges are under state permits and they meet all of the criteria of any industrial operation. So the permits ensure that those releases do not have any adverse impact on the public or the environment. Do we need to sound byte those a little more? That was a long tirade.

CALLISON: It seems that in the past, the national security need has kind of required a sense of secrecy surrounding (inaudible) and I'm wondering if now that the cold war is over, if the government is able to be a little more open about what they're doing. It sounds to me that they're being pretty open about what they're releasing into the environment. I guess I'm just asking you to address that and maybe if you feel comfortable, not only in the context of Hanford, but in the context of the entire complex.

BOSTON: Okay, let me comment on the past secrecy surrounding nuclear weapons production not only here at Hanford, but everywhere throughout the DOE complex, I think the challenges were similar.

As a result of this secrecy, workers weren't always aware of what they were working on and what the hazards were and neither were their supervisors and that likely did result in people being exposed to hazards that they were not aware of. That's a challenge today, when we look back at the workers who were exposed in the past, over the past 40 to 50 years.

Because of the secrecy, there weren't good records of where people were and what they were working on. Although there were controls in place and the Department tried hard to protect people, standards changed and sometimes, the lack of information resulted in individuals being exposed to levels greater than what was anticipated and we're seeing some of the implications of that now.

The challenge of the secrecy, however, is that there are not good records of where people were and what they were working on. The culture of secrecy meant that people didn't talk about where they were and what they were working on and frequently didn't understand what they were working on. So when we go back today and ask workers, "Did you work with this material, did you work with that hazard," they frequently don't know.

We're doing a lot of work now to reach out to former workers to find out who was working where. For example, concerning beryllium, which results in lung cancer, we've surveyed our facilities and found all the facilities where we believe beryllium had been used in the past and then tried to find the workers who worked in those facilities. How do we do that? Well, we put articles in the newspaper, "Who worked in this facility in the past?" We go to the labor unions, "Which one of your union members worked in these facilities?" We look at our own records and try to find out who was working in those facilities.

So the secrecy has been a challenge and it's a challenge even today because the old records just aren't very good, a lot wasn't written down, we don't have a good record of who was where when. So although we've tried to protect workers in the past, it's hard to go back and put the pieces together.

CALLISON: Are supervisors (inaudible)? I mean this isn't really an interview question.

BOSTON: No, that's a fair question, though. No, the supervisors understood the work they were trying to get done, but a typical engineer running a job wasn't always cognizant of the potential hazards. And then standards change. The level of exposure to beryllium has changed by a factor of ten over the last ten or 20 years. And so between standards changing and people not always being aware of the hazards as they were laying out work --

Now a lot of that's changed today, as you might imagine. There's a tremendous amount of work to make sure that workers are involved in understanding what they're working on, the hazards are fully analyzed and that all the protective measures are in place before we let anybody get into an environment. When they get into a hazardous environment, they have protective clothing, they have respirators and such, if needed, so they have protective gear, and there's a lot of monitoring that goes on to ensure that gear is appropriate for the hazards in that environment.

There's also medical surveillance programs. When we know somebody's going to be exposed to, potentially exposed to a hazardous chemical, working in an environment where there's a hazardous chemical or radioactivity, first we ensure they're fit to wear the protective equipment and to work under those conditions and then we get them on a surveillance program where we ensure that, one, they're not exposed above safe levels, and then follow up with them through medical surveillances and keep those records.

CALLISON: Could you talk a little bit about why DOE is conducting the field hearings?

BOSTON: Okay, Dr. Michaels was here several weeks ago and conducted a field hearing to listen to workers. We want to get the word out that the Department of Energy cares about the past workers, that it recognizes that the defense workers were essentially veterans of the cold war and as a result of that work, some people have adverse health effects today. We wanted to have these hearings so people would come forward and share their stories and encourage others who potentially are experiencing health effects to share their stories, so that they're aware that the government is concerned and that there are programs in place and being put in place to compensate and help them.

So the goal there was to listen, to make people aware and also to resensitize on what's going on today and make sure that all workers today aren't back in 20 years with a series of health impacts.

CALLISON: My follow-up question would be why now, but I'm trying to figure out if you --

BOSTON: I don't have a good answer for that.

CALLISON: Is it just because Secretary Richardson decided to?

BOSTON: I think things changed in time, you know. For a long time, there was a, "We don't think there's going to be any health impacts, we can't really tell." As we've learned more about cancers and different types of cancers and we've learned more about the impacts of certain hazards like asbestos and beryllium and other toxic materials, we recognize that, gee, there really is a potential. And as we've had time to go and do some health studies now, which weren't done in the past, of course, the health studies following up workers years later, and you start to see that there is a pattern. It indicates that, yes, some workers seem to have been adversely impacted, seem to really have health effects as a result of exposure. And so I suspect that, you know, that's the impetus behind reaching out now. We know enough now to say yes, that some workers have been impacted and it's time to do something about it.

CALLISON: Let me just kind of say whatever comes into my head right now and stop me if you find (inaudible) the answer. You said you're working to protect current workers, but you also mentioned standards change constantly. Do you take that into account when you're trying to protect them and how do you think about that?

BOSTON: Good. The standards change through time and so how do we assure that the way we're protecting the workers is adequate, so they won't be back in ten or 20 years with health impacts? We have a concept that says we're going to minimize the exposure of any worker to any type of hazardous condition, so we don't take people up to the exposure levels and say, "Well, now you've gotten your full exposure, that's okay, you're safe." We keep everything as low as we possibly can through a series of multiple layers of protection, so we try to keep exposures as low as we reasonably can, we stay well below levels where we even have any indication there's a potential for impact.

CALLISON: I'm going to go ahead and ask you this question, but it's going to be a short answer. With the __________ health clinics (inaudible), how likely are the health issues (inaudible)?

BOSTON: There are people who live downwind of the Hanford site who have claimed that past releases from the Hanford site have resulted in health impacts on them or their families. It's hard to say how probable that is. We've looked at that very hard, we've had two different groups of scientists in looking. The Department of Energy first brought in a group of scientists who looked very carefully at the releases in the past, so they tried to piece together a history of past releases, they say reconstruct the dose to people downwind from releases. Their conclusion was that the probability of any health effects was fleetingly small, so there's a very low probability that Hanford releases were causing any health effects to folks who lived downwind.

Subsequently, the Agency for Disease Control was brought in and they also looked, with an independent group this time, and recently reached similar conclusions, not that it couldn't happen, but the probability was really quite low.

CALLISON: What are the difficulties in trying to link the two together?

BOSTON: The challenge in linking past releases with impacts, there are so many. First, what really were the past releases? The records are such that it's hard to tell how much really came up a stack at a given time. Which way was the wind blowing when it came up; was it widely dispersed or was it narrowly dispersed? When it fell, did it fall in a small area or did it fall in a broad area. Frequently, the paths were cows eating grass and then people drinking milk. Did the cows eat the grass at that time, was it raining. How much milk did people really drink? How much iodine really got into the milk? It's just very difficult to put all that together.

And then also the uncertainties of the relationship between dose, how much iodine you really took in that are low levels and what the consequences might be. So the process is fraught with uncertainties. We have had the very best people in the country and perhaps in the world look at that, so we're trying to put that story together.

CALLISON: I'm going to stand up and cheer. I've been asking people that question and that's the first time I've gotten an answer --

BOSTON: Oh, God.

CALLISON: -- that actually makes sense. I mean I know that there are uncertainties, but it's like when I'm trying to relate that to the viewers, it's really hard to --

BOSTON: See, understand that for years, that envelope of secrecy, that veil of secrecy really impacted the record keeping. At another site I was responsible for burial grounds, these were national level burial grounds for the Atomic Energy Commission. And the classified records had such little information in them that the unclassified had almost nothing, so even in the classified records, there was almost no information that would help you understand potential health implications.

So it's just very tough to go back. You have to go back to what was going on at Site X at what time, what processes. What might have ended up in this drum; where did that drum go? Who might have been exposed to it? It's very tough to piece that puzzle back together. What we can do is measure who's exposed to what today and protect today's worker and protect the public and the environment today. But going back and reconstructing what happened in the past is very, very tough.

CALLISON: That got most of my questions. I just have one that I wanted to ask. When you were saying that you're hoping to release 500 of the 560 to the public, my immediate question is how clean is clean? I mean what are the standards and do they differ if you're talking about putting a park up versus a factory?

BOSTON: How clean is clean and how clean enough, how clean do we have to get the land before it's released for other uses? How clean we have to get land before it's released for other uses depends on what the other use is going to be. The goal is always to clean it as clean as you possibly can because then you can do anything with it, but it's not always technically, nor economically feasible to do that. And so working with the regulators, cleanup levels are selected that protect public health and the environment.

If you're going to free release land so it can be used for anything, you have to assume people will grow vegetables on it and eat vegetables from that land and they'll drink ground water from beneath that land. And if there are contaminants in the soil or the water, they can receive quite a -- they can receive those contaminants, they can be exposed to them in the future, as opposed to an industrial site where you're likely to put a concrete slab on the surface and people walk on the asphalt or walk on the concrete, they don't grow vegetables and eat them, they tend not to drink the ground water there, you can put controls in place.

So how clean is clean depends on what you're going to do in the future. The challenge, of course, is the future goes on forever and our purview is relatively short, compared to the persistence of the contaminants. So it's a national challenge, how do you protect people in the future and how clean is clean later on.

CALLISON: All right. Do you have anything you want to add?

BOSTON: Let me think. What did we talk about?

CALLISON: A little bit of everything. We talked about the river, health impacts.

BOSTON: You got the idea that we're doing lots of monitor -- I wouldn't mind saying a little bit about what we're doing for workers today, that wouldn't hurt. I think we've got enough of that, just let me look at some of these notes. I don't have Sandy here and she did such a good job. We talked about the past and I told you the plutonium story and -- that's another thing.

Most of the uranium in the complex -- right now in Dubre, Kentucky, there's concern, there's evidence that workers had been exposed to plutonium and neptunium and technetium, byproducts of dealing with the uranium that had been in nuclear reactors. Well, most of the uranium in the DOE complex that went through nuclear reactors also came through Hanford. Now it turns out our workers don't have the same risk because we didn't have the same processes that concentrated some of those materials, but most of the uranium came through here as well. We really have all the problems everybody else has and then some.

What I wanted to say something about was the workers, though. Okay, that's what I wanted to get to. See, I have Sandra's presentation from when Michaels was here, she did such a good job.

What are we doing to protect workers today and to ensure that our workers today won't be back with health problems in the future. A key part is getting workers involved. First, we want to make sure that we understand all the hazards associated with what we're doing and that can be tough going into old facilities where the hazards aren't always known. Nonetheless, a key is finding out everything we can about the potential hazards.

And then we work with workers and with health professionals to make sure a series of controls are in place to protect the workers from those hazards. If workers are going to be working in a hazardous environment, we have an automated job hazard analysis, a process that says what are the hazards, what are the protections, and make sure that we take everything we know into account in protecting the workers. We also put those workers on a medical surveillance program to make sure that they're fit to do the work and that their physical condition is surveilled through time to make sure that they aren't taking up any hazards or radioactive materials.

We have the unions involved working very closely with us, union safety representatives who are on the job working with us. All of our workers have stop work authority. Any time a worker feels a job isn't safe or they don't know enough about what they're doing to feel safe, they can stop work and they're not -- they're encouraged to do that. They're not punished for doing that or looked down upon by anyone, we absolutely encourage them to do that, because we don't want anybody to get hurt, we want our jobs to be safe. Recently, some workers have commented that this is one of the safest places they've ever worked, which is not what you might expect, given some of the challenges we face. But we've done so much work with the workers to get them involved.

We have accident councils. When there's an accident, we share information on that accident and ask how do we prevent it from happening. We share that information across the DOE complex and with industry so we can be smarter and help protect workers.

We have an employee job task analysis, every employee, me and my secretary and the folks down the hall. Even on our jobs, they ask what on our job might we be doing where we could be injured and we try to evaluate that and make sure that controls are in place so that we don't get injured, even if it's simply ergonomic controls. So we really do a tremendous amount of work with our employees, getting employees involved in having a safe work environment.

CALLISON: Now is this just for Hanford or is this for the entire DOE complex?

BOSTON: This worker involvement in safety and this integrated approach to safety where we take into account protecting the public, protecting the environment, protecting the workers, that's all part of an integrated safety management approach or integrated safety management system that's being implemented across the DOE complex. It takes the best commercial practices and the best nuclear practices and environmental practices and puts them together with the workers in the middle, the goal being to understand the hazards, implement the controls, safely conduct the work and then feedback, continually learning and getting smarter and safer.

CALLISON: Great.

BOSTON: That was a good thing to say. There's so much we do. We've got beryllium awareness groups and just lots of good stuff going on.

CALLISON: We went up and down the river a couple of days ago to check out some of the sites and it's pretty impressive.

BOSTON: This is big.

CALLISON: It's huge.

BOSTON: Well, you have to think about the people who built this place, you know, and the tools they had. You know, can you imagine coming here in the 1940s and building nuclear reactors and no one else had ever built one and building these chemical processing plants and no one else had ever built one. And they didn't blow up, you know, they worked. The things people did over the years at these DOE facilities are absolutely amazing, just absolutely amazing.

And when you look back at the records, they tried to operate in a way that was protective of health and the environment, that was always a primary direction in what they were doing. And as we've learned now, not everything that was done did protect the workers and did protect the environment and so we're following up on that today.

CALLISON: I think a lot of that is just based on a misunderstanding of what they were doing.

BOSTON: The standards have changed and the knowledge of what the hazards were, and that secrecy had to do with that, not understanding what the potential hazards were. And then not having a formalized approach like we have today, too. We have this formal system, this integrated safety management which helps us, and a number of other processes and systems we use. But it's a formal way of the way we do business where that safety and worker involvement are first and that really helps protect workers.