A mother doe, flanked by a fawn still in spots, bounds through belly-deep sage at the foot of Lalíik, colonially known as Rattlesnake Mountain. At 3,600 feet, Lalíik is the tallest treeless mountain in the Lower 48. For thousands of years, it’s been a place of ceremony and sustenance for families now enrolled with the Nez Perce Tribe, the Wanapum Band of Priest Rapids, the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. “For whatever reason, people try to shorten our time in this land,” said Emily Washines (Yakama), board president of the environmental nonprofit Columbia Riverkeeper. “They say, ‘Well, you weren’t here when the Missoula floods happened.’ And we know that we were here because that’s the mountain that we went to when there was water.” Lalíik means “land above the water” in Ichishkíin.
The mountain presides over an elbow of the mid-Columbia River in Washington, where today the basin’s largest remaining population of fall chinook salmon spawn. The landscape is largely intact and sheltered from development — but not because of environmental laws, conservation groups or Indigenous management. It has been closed off since 1943, when the occupying government seized 580 square miles and, in a matter of months, built experimental war machines that poisoned the ground so badly it’s now the most contaminated nuclear site in the Western Hemisphere. This is the Hanford site.
Today, the Lalíik area is home to pygmy rabbits, burrowing owls and many other species — “the largest natural animal and plant community in the arid and semi-arid shrub-steppe region of North America,” according to the Department of Energy (DOE), which oversees the site. But underground, it’s a different story. Beneath the scattered buildings, nuclear waste seeps into the soil and groundwater in catastrophic doses. An online tracking tool reveals underground plumes of 10 different toxic chemicals and radioactive isotopes, ranging from fewer than 100 acres of subterranean uranium contamination to over 14,000 acres of tritium. Many plumes overlap, and some contaminants appear in multiple locations. Once they soak into the groundwater, they spread even faster, migrating to the Columbia River. In 2010, the DOE discovered that, underneath one building, the cesium and strontium levels in the soil were “high enough that direct contact from a human would not be survivable.” The DOE has to handle demolition carefully to avoid kicking up radioactive dust. This is also a hazard with wildfires, like the June blaze that burned 570 acres of the Hanford Reach, a buffer zone around the site that includes Lalíik. President Bill Clinton designated the Reach as a national monument in 2000.
During World War II, American scientists planned to use piles of graphite and uranium to mass-produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. They needed a remote site with access to electricity — which Hanford offered, via the Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams — and plenty of cold water to cool plutonium-producing reactors. Yakama elder Russell Jim summed it up: The United States determined that “the area was an isolated wasteland and the people were expendable.” The U.S. government evicted the towns of White Bluffs and Hanford, giving farmers just 30 days’ notice to abandon their ripening crops. The U.S. hastily built the world’s first industrial-scale nuclear reactor — the B Reactor — along with racially segregated barracks and trailer camps for 48,000 workers and facilities that supplied them with 30,000 donuts and 16,000 cigarette packs a day. Not all workers knew exactly what they were working on, and even the scientists were unsure whether the huge reactor would work. They raced to outpace the Germans, with no thought for future cleanup. It took about 4,000 pounds of uranium from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to produce a single pound of plutonium; anything left over became toxic, radioactive waste. It’s been poisoning the soil and groundwater ever since and will do so for years to come.
The plutonium went to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where Americans put 14 pounds of it into a bomb code-named “Fat Man,” which they dropped on Nagasaki even though government officials knew the Japanese planned to surrender. At its peak, Hanford’s nine reactors manufactured plutonium around the clock. By 1987, when the last reactor was decommissioned, Hanford had produced 74 tons of plutonium — about the weight of a fin whale, and enough for over 10,000 American bombs. Test detonations of Hanford-fueled bombs damaged ecosystems and communities in the Marshall Islands’ Bikini Atoll and in Nevada.
Today, the 580-square-mile Hanford Site holds 56 million gallons of nuclear waste, much of it radioactive sludge stored in 177 sometimes-leaky tanks. The DOE has dismantled some reactors down to their cores, cocooned them in concrete and metal, and left them to decay for the next 75 years, when the federal government will re-evaluate whether full demolition is possible.
Since decommissioning the reactors, the DOE has entered into “cooperative agreements” with the Umatilla, Yakama and Nez Perce governments and consulted with the federally unrecognized Wanapum Band. Tribal involvement is mostly limited to commenting on federal cleanup efforts. But for years, tribal nations have fought for greater influence over the process, testifying before lawmakers and conducting research that corrects federal work. Tribal leaders say they have many questions about cleanup, and few answers from the agency.
An agency spokesperson told HCN that the DOE takes its trust responsibilities seriously and provides funding for tribal input about cleanup and land access. “Representatives from multiple levels of the Department meet and communicate with the tribes on a frequent and ongoing basis,” the spokesperson said in an email. “Discussions range from formal government-to-government consultation between Tribal and Departmental representatives to staff-level discussions to enhance awareness and strengthen relationships.”
This past June, for the fourth year, the Yakama Nation and Columbia Riverkeeper hosted Hanford Journey at Hanford Reach. “Oftentimes, when we talk about the river, or protecting the river, we’re not around the river,” said Washines. Hanford Journey is a cultural event designed to get people out on the land, reminding them it’s more than just a radioactive wasteland. The two-day event includes a guided boat tour of the Reach and educational presentations about the clean-up. It continues the work of Jim, who helped found the tribal nation’s Environmental Restoration Waste Management program, which labors to influence decisions about the cleanup process. Over the decades, Jim secured federal funding and testified before the U.S. Congress about the harms of Hanford’s nuclear waste. The Yakama Nation and Columbia Riverkeeper have sent tribal youth to Los Alamos to learn more about their complicated inheritance. “It’s going to be a big burden on all of us,” said Jim in a 2013 talk at the University of Washington in Seattle. “You younger generation have to realize what you’re going to be faced with, and perhaps your children and grandchildren also.”
The boat tour starts on a Hanford Reach riverbank with a distant view of Lalíik, across a swath of sagebrush where Indigenous people once set up winter camps. Here they fished in the clear meandering bends of the Big River, made hunting equipment, climbed Lalíik for ceremony and gathered foods and medicines, some of which only grow at this site.
Around a riverbend, a few buildings came into view: reactors with their high cooling towers and the water intake for a pump that once funneled 75,000 gallons of water a minute through the reactors. Dan Serres, advocacy director at Columbia Riverkeeper, described the contaminants in the soil and water. Serres, a former member of the Hanford Advisory Board, which communicates community perspectives to agencies, explained that contaminants include 387 acres of strontium-90, a radioactive isotope that, if ingested, becomes part of human bones like calcium, except that it causes bone cancer. There are also 4,083 acres of hexavalent chromium — “the Erin Brockovich chemical. Super, super dangerous.” Cleanup is complicated by the variety of contaminant behaviors and half-lives. Some sink into the riverbed while others wash far downstream. Some will continue polluting for a few more decades, others for tens of thousands of years.
The federal government moves some of the most hazardous material, including plutonium and uranium, to places like Los Alamos. They store other waste, including the husks of nuclear submarines, in a massive landfill in the middle of the Hanford Site. Meanwhile, the DOE is emptying some of the leaky underground tanks, hoping to turn their sludge into a stable form of glass.
Current efforts also include “soil flushing,” which involves flooding the soil with water to deliberately carry more toxins into the groundwater. Afterward, technicians “pump and treat” — extracting the groundwater, removing contaminants and injecting the treated water back into the aquifer. “You have to flush it to get it out. Otherwise, they stay there and slowly release into the groundwater,” said Li Wang, a hydrogeologist with the Yakama Nation’s Environmental Restoration Waste Management program.
But federal cleanup has been so slow and expensive that some government officials have suggested abandoning the site. Just days before the Hanford Journey, the DOE sent tribal leaders a new report listing three possible cleanup strategies, each with a 290-year timeframe — the agency’s best estimate for how long it will take strontium-90 to decay to what they consider acceptable levels in the aquifer. “The upshot is, they’re going to wait for 300 years,” Serres said.
In 2023, the departments of Energy and the Interior signed a legally nonbinding memorandum of understanding, promising to support tribal nations’ spiritual and cultural connections to Lalíik. Meanwhile, tribal nations and federal agencies are pursuing co-stewardship or possibly co-management agreements for the mountain.
Every year, the tribal Environmental Restoration Waste Management program enlists interns to help solidify site cleanup as a multigenerational endeavor. Josephine Buck (Yakama), a geography student at Central Washington University, is interning on the cultural team to ensure that certain historic areas remain undisturbed during cleanup, preserving their natural serenity. “A big part of that is just trying to get the land back to close to what it was before,” said Buck. “It’ll never be the same, but to get it close.” She said they hope to someday bring people back, noting that the land didn’t become Hanford until fairly recently. The timeline for a safe return is uncertain, but tribal members recognize it will take generations.
Meanwhile, access to Lalíik and to the rest of Hanford Reach, which is not contaminated, is improving. Earlier this year, the Yakama Nation returned to Lalíik for the first tribal elk hunt there in 70 years— using Geiger counters to make sure the elk meat was safe. “The way that we reference the land is, more broadly, ichi timinii tiichum iwa nimi, which translates to ‘this land is a part of me,’” Washines explained. She said her people’s DNA is linked to the foods and medicines found here. “We are stronger by those resources, and we need to be sure that we always speak for them.”
Jim passed away in 2018, at the age of 82. But his intergenerational work continues. “We have a mandate to preserve and protect our land and resources for the future generations,” he said in a 2003 interview at Hanford with the Atomic Heritage Foundation. “And we do not look out just for the Yakama People. We look out for all people.”
This article appeared in the August 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Lalíik.”
This article first appeared on High Country News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.