The Hanford Experience

While most people would not, perhaps, include their work as an “adventure” there are elements of UXO field work that I feel could certainly apply. Honestly, I’ve had some crazy stories come out of my time in the field that rival some of my travel stories, a fact I believe anyone who’s worked at a UXO site can attest to!

For this particular job there is the actual nature of the site that makes it somewhat “original” and unique. The Hanford Site, where Roy and I have been working for the past two weeks, is a decommissioned (for the most part) nuclear production center that was originally established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project and was home of the first full-scale plutonium production reactor in the world. To add to its infamy Hanford can lay claim to having developed the plutonium that went into the first nuclear bomb which was dropped over Nagasaki, Japan during WWII. Subsequently the project expanded to include nine nuclear reactors and five large plutonium processing complexes from which most of the 60,000 weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal were developed. The manufacturing process has left behind 53 million gallons of high-level radioactive waste that remains on the site representing two-thirds of the United States high-level waste by volume. Currently the federal government spends $2 billion annually and employs about 11,000 workers on the clean-up effort, despite this Hanford still remains the most contaminated nuclear site within the U.S. In order to work on the site you have to sit though a veritable college curriculum of safety classes covering topics where you learn such things as the difference in the warning sirens you could potentially hear on the site, archaeological training, asbestos avoidance, how to handle potential targeting by foreign spies and terrorists, site specific safety, UXO specific safety, etc, etc, etc….

Given the above, the work Roy and I were out there doing seems the proverbial small potatoes - attempting to clean up UXO (unexploded ordinance) from a formal pistol range along the base of a scared Native American site within the Hanford complex. A typical day meant getting up at the bright and cheerful time of 4:20 am to arrive on site by 6:00 am for the daily safety brief (and stretching, can’t forget the stretching). We’ve spent the last two weeks pushing an EM61 (for those unfamiliar with this instrument it’s a time-domain metal detector) over, around, and through around 61 separate, 100ft x 100ft grids with about 40 pounds of batteries strapped on our backs. This was accomplished typically over varying terrain with the ubiquitous and often completely exasperating sagebrush scattered across the grids in typical Washington weather, cold, rainy, and blustery until 4:00 pm at which point we headed back to our motel (and to be fair this was actually an “easy” site compared to others I’ve been on). Afterward we would download the data, photocopy notes, write up a daily summary of work, charge the heaps of batteries that take up every outlet in your hotel room, head to the gym to lift (first time in years that I’ve seriously lifted weights again and it’s been fun…Roy’s been a great personal coach), then off to grab dinner and crash into bed to repeat the process the following day.

On the weekends things liven up a bit. The first weekend in Richland we stayed local and went out on the town with some of the UXO techs and personnel from the site. We had a great time partying it up at The Pub and Jokers, were many drinks were enjoyed, dancing (dirty and otherwise) took place, and quite a few laughs were shared. We also experienced Jason and Brandon’s combined cooking prowess when we were invited over for a BBQ and movie…the pork chops were spot on and a welcome break from all the restaurant food we’d been eating! The second weekend Roy and I headed west to Seattle where we enjoyed the hospitality of my dear friends Bill and Vanessa. We had a fabulous time hitting up some of Seattle’s plethora of enchanting, delectable, and unique bars and restaurants, climbing at Stone Gardens, eating scrumptious cupcakes (for breakfast nonetheless…at least in Roy’s case…Vanessa and I chose to eat ours at 2:00 am after hours of drinking and if my somewhat fuzzy memory serves me correctly they were scrumptious), seeing old friends and meeting new ones, and participating in a pub crawl that ended in the wee hours of the morning!