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?   Thank you to the supporters of KUOW, you help make this show possible! If you want to help out, go to kuow.org/donate/soundsidenotes Soundside is a production of KUOW in Seattle, a proud member of the NPR Network. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.