How to clean up Hanford is merely an unprecedented technological problem. The debate now is what to do with the vacant land-only 6 to 10 percent of which was used for plutonium production. Farmers and development-hungry local officials want to reclaim thousands of acres that residents were forced to cede to the U.S. government beginning in 1943; the greens want it designated a wildlife refuge. With only a touch of hyperbole, Jeb Baldi of the Columbia River Conservation League says, “It’s Oklahoma all over again-the last great land grab.”
Why would anyone want the Hanford land? The government defended it with barbed-wire fences and rifle-toting guards, so neither cow nor human has tramped around there much for 50 years. Although rabbits and fish have measurable levels of radioactive strontium 90, so far “we don’t have any 10-foot jack rabbits,” says Baldi. Even more than particular species, conservationists want to save an ecosystem that’s disappearing faster than the ancient forests: 166,000 acres of sagebrush with an understory of bluebunch wheatgrass and Sandberg bluegrass. They also want to keep undammed the 51 miles of Columbia River running through Hanford. It’s the last spawning ground on the Columbia for chinook salmon, and the only undammed part of the river in the United States. There is good reason to leave well enough alone: dams would raise the water table and “pop to the top all kinds of evil things buried on the reservation,” notes Ed Chaney, an Idaho environmentalist.
This is where farmers want to plant? After the National Park Service recommended last year that the Columbia be protected as a “wild and scenic river,” and that 89,000 uncontaminated acres north and east of it be designated a wildlife refuge, farmers countered with their own proposal. They promise to keep the river undammed, leave 32,000 acres undeveloped but turn as much as 57,000 acres into cropland. Farmers admit there might be a little perception problem in selling produce from a site near contaminants that make Alar on apples look as dangerous as fuzz on a peach. But they promise not to irrigate with ground water that may contain strontium. And if they miscalculate? Maybe they’ll stumble on a nouveau niche market: salad greens that glow in the dark.
