Chief William Burke: Coming to Terms with Hanford

Some of the Hanford underground storage tanks under construction during the Manhattan Project.

US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY

wetyétmes tılaylá·kapıt (Chief William H. Burke) 1930-2025

On June 17, 1999, Bill Burke was interviewed by Michael O’Rourke for the Hanford Health Information Archives. This article contains excerpts from that interview. Edited and compiled by Tamástslikt Institute, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.

My awareness of Hanford came in 1986. And you could have thrown a wet washcloth into my face and not woke me up any more joltingly than when I first learned about Hanford. I was the manager of the Tribe’s Nuclear Waste Study Program. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 identified us as an “affected Indian tribe” along with the Yakamas and Nez Perces. I was the Vice-Chairman of the Tribal governing body, the Board of Trustees, and I was asked to take a shot at being the manager. I said, “Why not?”

I was at a meeting of the National Congress of American Indians, and the Penobscot were there. From Maine. And the Penobscot Tribal Chairperson asked me, “Why don’t you just keep that nuclear waste at Hanford? You’ve had it there for the last two decades; why not continue to keep it there?” And it was that message that really woke me up: she told me how long Hanford had been there and how contaminated it really was.

The States and Tribes Government Working Group was a result of the planning for the big geologic repository. They were looking at the location for the geological repository and were considering public opinion on where that should be. And reasons for it to be in Nevada or maybe in Mississippi in the salts, or maybe it should be in the tufts, and all of this. But where it really should be is in Washington, DC, in the granites. That’s where it should have been placed. But there was no consideration of putting it there because of the populace, the big cities, and so on. And that made it a bad spot even though it was probably the finest media we could have put it in.

So we went to work. Our primary goal was to discourage the Basalt Waste Isolation Project being located at Hanford down in the basalts. Studying the media, it was clear to us that radioactive waste couldn’t be stored there because of the fracturing of the basalts. They were so fractured that there was no way that we could have done it safely. There was no way to prevent the infiltration of water and contamination of the Columbia River. There was just no way in the world. The thinking at Hanford was to keep it right there in the basalt and somehow or another we would make it safe. The Basalt Waste Isolation at Hanford proposal made it all the way to the top three alternatives prior to Nevada being selected. Not long after that, the three tribes, the Yakamas, the Nez Perce, and the Umatillas, were having a meeting in Lapwai, Idaho, and each of the program directors was called out to a telephone conversation with Washington, DC, and told their program funding was done, they’d decided to send all the high-level waste to Nevada.

But Hanford is not going away. You are still on land that we ceded to you in the treaty of 1855. We were still concerned about all those resources that we had on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. We just made the argument with the Department of Energy, “You’re still on our land, as far as our resources are concerned. And we’ve got to protect that. The treaty says you have to protect that and we have to have the oversight.” So we got refunded, we got more funding, and we got the program back again. We went from zilch to three and a half million dollars in eighteen months' time.

-wetyétmes tılaylá·kapıt (William Burke), 1999

Bibliography

William Burke, Oral History interview by Michael O’Rourke. June 17, 1999, Hanford Health Information Archives collection, AR69-2-0-21, Series 1: Donor Materials, Donor 634. Washington State Archives.