The Nuclear Dole

I am spending Thanksgiving in Richland, WA, the bedroom community for the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the most-polluted nuclear site in the United States and one of the worst in the world.

Richland now sprawls into its neighboring town on the Columbia River, Kennewick. The river separates Kennewick from the ville of Pasco, once a sleepy farm town and county center and now a transportation hub and also depot for the cocaine, heroin and meth trades.

Together the three towns make up the Tri-Cities, which have annexed all the nearby sagebrush steppes and riverbanks and hills. Giant houses mushroom the terrain, with the greatest and most ugly, per the rule of the rich, fungising the hilltops and waterfront. The whole area booms with population and has, with the exception of some of the older neighborhoods in the town, all of the charm of a monstrous strip mall.

Hanford hasn’t produced much in the way of nuclear materials in decades. A couple of plants generate electricity.

Pollution–the federally financed effort to neutralize some truly dangerous nuclear remains and accompanying nasty chemical baths–drives the economy and the population boom.

The cleanup so far has generated, aside from vast of handouts of money from the U.S. Treasury, far more errors, delays, mistakes and petty frauds than riddance of bad stuff with half lives reaching into the oncoming eons.

It doesn’t seem to make much difference in accomplishments whether a Democrat sits in the Oval Office or a Republican: The U.S. Department of Energy can withstand any effort to make it smart, capable and efficient.

I used to live in Richland and served a few years on its city council. The voters gave me my freedom because I said yes to a motion to fluoridate the water. I still love the area, especially the great river, and delight with my wife Sonjia in visiting dear friends, Rich and Wanda Steele.

Beyond that, Richland and environs provides the entertainments to mind and soul that come from seeing the power of the federal dollar at work, providing many with high-paying jobs that even if they don’t accomplish much do help to sustain a burgeoning economy for many others.

Richland’s many, many highly educated engineers and other professionals consistently vote Republican and, with a few exceptions that keep the Democratic Party breathing here, argue that federal taxes are too high and too many federal dollars provide welfare for ne’er-do-wells without college degrees.

Plainly, the money must go instead in large doles to Hanford and like projects to keep nuclear, chemical and other engineers and professionals in beefsteak and vino and provide enough extra spending money to allow for contributions to the Republican Party.

Yes, the cleanup must go on. But will it ever come to fruition? Then what?
Hanford shut down? All these lucrative jobs lost? Tumbleweed rolling down shuttered streets?

I know better. The federal tit will come up with new milk. Don’t want to put an army of conservatives out the streets pushing grocery carts, after all: Too cruel. They might want welfare.