Oh, the spinning monkey shit turd castle that is the Hanford nuclear site in southeastern Washington. Like falling off a log into warm water, the lilies swaying in a summer breeze ease with which those small penis – big ego men said, “Duh, We’re creating vast quantities of diabolically toxic waste that we have absolutely no idea how to deal with, so let’s just put it in leaky, temporary tanks and let someone else figure it out in the future.”
Like selling off your organs hoping to figure out how to grow new ones, technological optimism is not a sound basis for public policy. I actually believe that a disk-shaped, anti-gravity spacecraft might land on the White house lawn and that the occupants could then step out and say, “Okay look Earthlings, we can’t bare to watch you do this to yourselves. We’ve been watching you for millennia hoping you’d figure this out, but you’re clearly not gonna, so let us take you by the hand and walk you through the process of becoming an advanced & sustainable species.” I actually believe that that could happen, BUT I’M CERTAINLY NOT GONNA COUNT ON IT!
But no, the decades tumbled like dancers as one olympic swimming pool-sized tank after another after another was constructed on the banks of the Colombia River and filled to the brim with horrifically toxic, creepy, weird-assed shit. Now, like etherial, slow motion angels of death, the plumes of radioactive groundwater slowly migrate toward the Columbia river and then downstream to all the darling weirdos in Portland.
As our magnificent leaders continue the slow motion train wreck of civilization, a particularly daunting problem is that of the spent fuel rods and other radioactive waste stored at Hanford and other nuclear sites. Remaining insidiously toxic for tens of thousands of years and with construction on a permanent storage facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada recently suspended, we must be concerned that these materials could be seized by terrorists or criminal gangs of mutant zombie tweekers. “You all bettah be real nice to us or them spent fuel rods might go missing. Hee hee hee….” As disparaging as I am of mutant zombie tweekers, are they really that much less sophisticated than 1950’s nuclear scientists and engineers? “We’ll just put this stuff in these tanks and hope for the best cuz we gotta stop those damn Commies….”
One decade after another, like a chrysalis somehow choosing to metamorphose into yet another caterpillar, there just isn’t much change in the nutty behavior of the atom splitting monkeys. And so Hanford and other nuclear sites shall continue to sit – woefully underfunded for the clean up at hand until one day the funding will stop, the clean up will stop and nature, entropy and human delusion shall continue to run their course.