Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson says workers harmed by nuclear waste are still protected despite Supreme Court ruling Tuesday
"While the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled against a 2018 state law that protected workers at a former nuclear weapons production site, Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson said an updated law passed earlier this year remains in place.
That means thousands of employees at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation can still be compensated for health issues they face because of their work.
“Because the legislature already fixed the issues the federal government raised, there is little practical impact in Washington as a result of this ruling,” Ferguson said Tuesday. “Hanford workers, and all others working with dangerous radioactive waste, remain protected.”
“The federal government has not challenged this new law. If they do, we will defend these protections all the way back up to the Supreme Court again if we have to,” Ferguson said.
Hanford, located near Richland in south-central Washington state, was created by the Manhattan Project during World War II and made the plutonium for much of the nation’s nuclear arsenal. Hanford plutonium was included in the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, at the end of World War II.
Hanford no longer makes plutonium, but some 10,000 workers are involved in cleaning up a massive volume of nuclear waste that was left behind. The dangerous work is expected to take decades."
For more on these workers and Hanford in fictional form, read my novel Storytellers at the Columbia River !
