“It’s an example of a culture at Hanford of ‘We don’t have problems here. We’re doing just fine.’ Which is a total lie,” former Hanford Nuclear Reservation worker Mike Geffre recently told Seattle’s KING 5.

Geffre was reacting to news that a supposedly super-safe, double-walled underground storage tank for highly radioactive waste has a major leak in the space between its inner and outer walls. Geffre warned officials in 2011 about the potential for such an event, but a response was ridiculously slow in coming.

Washington state’s Department of Ecology sought to allay public worries, saying there is no sign that sludge created during plutonium production made it past the tank’s outer shell into the environment. To its credit, the state been a more zealous watchdog than other parties involved in Hanford oversight. But its reassurances are starting to ring hollow.

“This is catastrophic,” Geffre told KING 5. “This is probably the biggest event to ever happen in tank farm history. The double shell tanks were supposed to be the saviors of all saviors” as far as keeping waste away from people and the environment. A current Hanford worker said, “The primary tanks weren’t designed to stage waste like this for so many years. There’s always the question, ‘Are the outer shells compromised?’”

Three of Hanford’s other double-shell tanks have the same design as the one now in the news.

Millions live downriver from Hanford. As massively expensive as the cleanup has been — around $40 billion so far, with maybe $75 billion more in the offing — it will pale in comparison to damages from a major toxin spill into the air and groundwater.

Citizens must use every political and legal tool to impose competent and responsive management on this dreadful fiasco.