Spokane mayor fights plan to move nuclear waste through city

Spokane mayor Lisa Brown is raising red flags about a plan to move liquid nuclear waste from Hanford through her city. 

She wrote a letter to the federal Department of Energy, the EPA, and Washington’s Department of Ecology asking those agencies to reconsider a plan for trucks filled with the waste to travel Eastbound I-90 out of Washington on their way to Utah and Texas. 

The 2,000 gallons set to be moved are just a tiny portion of the 56 million gallons sitting under the Hanford site, north of the Tri-Cities, that needs to be disposed of. 

This may feel like a Cold War-era legacy but today, nuclear energy is making a comeback. And as the Hanford story shows, even with all of this new buzz around nuclear, there is still no long-term place to put all the radioactive byproduct.

Guests:

John Stang, reporter covering Hanford for Cascade PBS

Allison Macfarlane, director at the University of British Columbia’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and a former chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission

Links:

Crosscut: Spokane doesn’t want feds to truck nuclear waste through the city

Scientific American: Nuclear Waste Is Piling Up. Does the U.S. Have a Plan?

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