What is green and goes burp in the night?

March 25, 2008 7:20 AM

The Hanford Site in SoutheastWashington (located on the Columbia River) is considered the dirtiest place on earth. 177 Underground storage tanks hold over 50 million gallons of radioactive and toxic waste. And they are leaking.

Constructed in 1943 as the plutonium production complex for the Manhattan Project, it covers 580 square miles and grew to have 9 nuclear reactors and 5 plutonium processing plants.

Poor management by the Department of Energy, and a changing list of contractors competing for the project by lowest bid have left an incredible mess to cleanup.

Here is another timeline of events documenting the habitual mis management of the project.

It is hard to believe that such a huge environmental disaster waiting to is rarely discussed.

If it wasn't for the Hanford Challenge event I was invited to last week, I still would not have known of it. They are a group working to help moderate the discussion between the whistleblowers and the contractors.

Hopefully they will complete the cleanup before these signs are out of date. (And more importantly, before the 1 million gallons of contaminated ground water reach the Columbia River).

The Burping (in the title) is in reference to the chemical storage tanks which has an amalgam of toxic and radioactive materials, still undergoing chemical reactions and in some cases releasing hydrogen gas. One whistleblower was a chemist who refused to not writeup an employee for smoking as they were monitoring one of the tanks, waiting for a burp.

P.S. Did you know the Richland (city local to the Hanford Site) Bombers are a highschool team with a mushroom cloud as their logo?

posted by mrzarquon (46 comments total)

If only we had somewhere to put all that waste.
posted by electroboy at 7:26 AM on March 25, 2008 [1 favorite]

I wish I had a pony and nuclear waste could be safely stored for 10,000 years.
posted by cytherea at 7:29 AM on March 25, 2008

I wish I had a pony and nuclear waste could be safely stored for 10,000 years.

It can, just not in leaky barrels adjacent to a major river.
posted by b1tr0t at 7:33 AM on March 25, 2008 [1 favorite]

A friend from Seattle told me the salmon fishing near Hanford is great, as long as you don't plan on eating them.
posted by electroboy at 7:35 AM on March 25, 2008

End of World? Check.
Feel fine? Check.
posted by blue_beetle at 7:37 AM on March 25, 2008

The biggest issue in the cleanup at Hanford has been the lack of interest by the contractors to do things safely in order to save a buck. They are trying to build a vitrification plant, which would store the hazardous materials in inert glass logs, but the technology and development of it is new, and when the Nuclear Regulatory Committee was pulled off the project in 2001 said that the project wasn't designed safely and wasn't being built properly.

It makes you think, if this is how well the largest and considered by some the most dangerous of the nuclear waste cleanups, how well is the giant storage vault going to built in new mexico? Also, the DOE has decided to send more waste to Hanford, as yet another 'temporary' holding area.
posted by mrzarquon at 7:40 AM on March 25, 2008

It can, just not in leaky barrels adjacent to a major river.

I know Jesus can do it, but I'm not sure I want the people who brought us the New Orleans levees in charge for longer than human civilization has existed. That's a long time when you only have to fuck up once.
posted by cytherea at 7:43 AM on March 25, 2008

Rather than the usual defense contractors, we should set up an X-prize for containing nuclear waste. Imagine Paul Allen, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and others all competing to build a simple and effective containment system.
posted by b1tr0t at 7:48 AM on March 25, 2008

You'd prefer it where it is?
posted by electroboy at 7:51 AM on March 25, 2008

Both parents of a friend of mine worked at Hanford in the 50's. All of their children (including my friend) have unexplained or unique health problems. This doesn't constitute evidence of any sort but with the rep the site has I'm convinced that they are all victims of shoddy containment.
posted by djeo at 7:58 AM on March 25, 2008 [1 favorite]

Rather than the usual defense contractors, we should set up an X-prize for containing nuclear waste. Imagine Paul Allen, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and others all competing to build a simple and effective containment system.

Yeah. I can see it now. Containers that blue screen. Then blow up. Plus if you just add a little more radiation you get free shipping.
posted by srboisvert at 8:02 AM on March 25, 2008

You'd prefer it where it is?

Yes, of course! That's exactly what I'm saying. Why, you're smart enough to be a long-term nuclear waste storage expert!
posted by cytherea at 8:12 AM on March 25, 2008

I'm sure Aesop wrote a fable for this: you pay to deal with a manageable problem now, or you pay a hell of a lot more to deal with a much more dangerous and more difficult to manage problem later. You choose.
posted by binturong at 8:16 AM on March 25, 2008

Can't we just shoot all that stuff to the moon? We get rid of waste, NASA gets funding, it's win/win!
Kidding aside, thanks for the post, mrzarquon. Freaky stuff.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 8:27 AM on March 25, 2008

It makes you think, if this is how well the largest and considered by some the most dangerous of the nuclear waste cleanups, how well is the giant storage vault going to built in new mexico?

Actually it's in Nevada. And since it (Yucca Mountain) was designed as a storage facility beginning in the mid 80's rather than storage as an afterthought since the 40's (Hanford), I'd say it is built pretty well. At least it looked like a great idea when I toured it in 2000. Better than the USTs at Hanford and better than the asphalt parking lot in the midwest with barrels stored in huge rows stacked 20 high just waiting for a carefully placed tornado.
posted by Big_B at 8:31 AM on March 25, 2008

A friend from Seattle told me the salmon fishing near Hanford is great, as long as you don't plan on eating them.

Yeah, the salmon are HUGE!
posted by Pollomacho at 8:36 AM on March 25, 2008

I'm not sure I want the people who brought us the New Orleans levees in charge for longer than human civilization has existed

(1) Put in sturdy containers.
(2) Move sturdy containers to dry valley in Antarctica.
(3) There is no (3)

Or,

(1) Vitrify.
(2) Put in lead container.
(3) Dump in subduction zone.
(4) Earth goes om nom nom nom.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 8:41 AM on March 25, 2008 [3 favorites]

A long time ago, when everyone I knew had mohawks or skater bangs, there was an argument. Several of us were against nuclear anything, and several of us were incensed that cheap, clean energy was being so roundly dismissed.

After a while, it all boiled down to this: if you can't trust people with garbage that can't kill you, why would you trust them with garbage that can?

From there, we lumped nuclear anything in with self-rule - something that should be saved for when humans have that whole responsibility thing figured out a bit more.
posted by batmonkey at 8:45 AM on March 25, 2008

Ah yes, the fable of the Overpriced Consultant and the No-Bid Contract, one of the classics. The problem is that it's not really manageable right now and it's steadily getting worse. Hanford will never be clean and we're going to spend billions of dollars to get it to the point where it's not horrifically dangerous.

I'm not sure I want the people who brought us the New Orleans levees in charge for longer than human civilization has existed

Levees are Corps of Engineers, Yucca Mountain is Dept of Energy and is being built by Bechtel/SAIC. Unless you mean the gubmint in general, in which case I don't know what to tell you. Yucca Mountain is really the best option right now. If some better disposal method comes along I don't see why it wouldn't be replaced, but right now it's all we've got.
posted by electroboy at 8:54 AM on March 25, 2008

(4) Earth goes om nom nom nom.

That kind of glowing optimism that things won't go wrong with such a plan can only be fueled with Hanford's glowing ultraradioactive waste. I think we have an X-Prize winner.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:56 AM on March 25, 2008

The nuclear waste situation at Hanford is certainly a mess. Its staggering to think how long this is going to be a problem for. But you know what's really funny about the Hanford reach?

It's actually the most wonderful, pristine environment of its kind left in the Northwest. Seriously, the biological diversity found there is staggering compared to the lands surrounding it. Some people are going to laugh about nuclear mutations and such and who knows, maybe that is part of it, accelerated rates of evolution due to the harsh selection value of radiation.

But what really makes Hanford such an ecological treasure is that it was a super secret facility and the government fenced off a huge area around the reactors and didn't let anyone in to do anything. As it turns out, the production of Plutonium and Tritium are far less hazardous to the environment than farming. Who knew?

Now the surrounding counties are trying to get access to the land there and bring it under local control so they can sell it as farm land because the quality of the soil in the other areas has steadily declined under industrial agriculture practices. Environmental groups are pushing for protection of the Hanford Reach along with a responsible cleanup effort to keep all that is good about the area intact.

If we can contain the nuclear waste well enough and not give in to greed when it comes to dealing with the surrounding lands, the horror of the nuclear weapons program may in fact leave us with one of the stunning jewels of protected land in the Northwest. Curious indeed.

For more reading, here's the Nature Conservancy on the Hanford Reach
posted by afflatus at 8:59 AM on March 25, 2008 [2 favorites]

Huge, I tell you!
posted by lathrop at 9:04 AM on March 25, 2008

Dude, that is a bass.
posted by electroboy at 9:05 AM on March 25, 2008

electroboy: Yucca Mountain is Dept of Energy and is being built by Bechtel/SAIC.

the "timeline" link above details the mismanagement on behalf of Bechtel at the Hanford Site.

I am not saying that Yucca mountain will be as bad as Hanford, but considering that a lot of the whistleblower cases at Hanford involved things such as underrated valves, improperly designed fixtures, and a culture resistant to speaking out against a project in terms of safety (all of this related to the cleanup project that has been underway since the 80s, not including the various testing, and general sloppiness that was the result of lack of understanding in the 40s and 50s) can leave one with a false sense of security.

"Look, everyone signed off on these pipe fixtures and valve seals, and the project is underway!" Oh wait, they installed underrated valves, and everyone checked off on it so they wouldn't get fired, and the original pipefitters who refused to do the work on the grounds of safety, were fired.
posted by mrzarquon at 9:06 AM on March 25, 2008

Huh, so it does. I guess it helps to RTFA. Cheerfully withdrawn.
posted by electroboy at 9:20 AM on March 25, 2008

The US has one, and only one, currently operating long-term nuclear waste storage facility. It's called WIPP, or Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, near Carlsbad, New Mexico. The site was studied for 20-odd years and has been receiving radwaste since 1999.

From the research I've done, it looks like a good solution the problem — I mean, better than anything else I've heard about, including Yucca Mountain, given that we're stuck with the waste. Basically, the stuff is buried in a salt bed. The salt is malleable, and over time it molds itself around the waste, forming an impermeable barrier. The surrounding geology has been stable for 250 million years. That's no guarantee of future performance, of course, but it seems a fairly safe bet for a few hundred thousand years.

The problem is that WIPP is "characterized", as they say in the biz, only for low-level radioactivity, not the hot high-level stuff that plagues sites like Hanford. I once asked a few experts whether they knew of a reason why high-level waste couldn't be stored there. They said no, except for politics. The Wikipedia page linked above says that high-level waste would create a wet environment that would corrode waste containers, so maybe that's the answer. But it strikes me as curious that the folks I spoke with, including WIPP engineers and a National Academy of Sciences specialist, didn't know that.
posted by Greenie at 9:21 AM on March 25, 2008

Why don't the feds just put the radioactive waste in barrels and drop them off in a major commercial fishery, say, 30 miles off the coast of San Francisco? If some of the barrels don't sink, they could shoot holes in them.

It wouldn't be the first time...
posted by mullingitover at 9:24 AM on March 25, 2008 [1 favorite]

Oops, that WIPP link should be Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
posted by Greenie at 9:27 AM on March 25, 2008

> But you know what's really funny about the Hanford reach?

It's just like Chernobyl!
posted by The Card Cheat at 9:39 AM on March 25, 2008

Whoa. I've been on the wrong side of this. As an environmental nazi (imagine a biodegradable, vegan, pleather stilletto boot stomping on a human face forever), I fully support the further Chernobylization of large swaths of the planet.
posted by cytherea at 10:28 AM on March 25, 2008

better than the asphalt parking lot in the midwest with barrels stored in huge rows stacked 20 high just waiting for a carefully placed tornado.

Do you have a source for this? Not that I don't believe you, but it's the first I've heard of it and the search terms I tried were too general for Google to give me anything interesting.

thanks!
posted by xbonesgt at 10:42 AM on March 25, 2008

"A unique kind of effluent":

This interview with Dr. Richard F. Foster, manager of the Aquatic Biology Division at the Hanford plutonium plant, presents his research that the plant's radioactive effluents have no effect on aquatic life in the Columbia River. Also featured is an interview with "science student of the week" Doyle Burke, senior at Columbia High School.

Video at: Hanford Science Forum (ca. 1957)
posted by cephalopodcast at 10:51 AM on March 25, 2008

afflatus: It's actually the most wonderful, pristine environment of its kind left in the Northwest. Seriously, the biological diversity found there is staggering compared to the lands surrounding it. Some people are going to laugh about nuclear mutations and such and who knows, maybe that is part of it, accelerated rates of evolution due to the harsh selection value of radiation.

You can actually get guided boat tours of the Reach by folks at the hanford challenge (sorry to plug them so much, they are the folks who turned me onto this stuff) which helps fund them, and is a good way to spend an afternoon.
posted by mrzarquon at 11:06 AM on March 25, 2008

P.S. Did you know the Richland (city local to the Hanford Site) Bombers are a highschool team with a mushroom cloud as their logo?

Yes, unfortunately I do. The attitude in town just amazes me. Most communities say not in my back yard, but the tri-cities say, "please, oh please, put the high level nuclear waste dump in my back yard."
posted by caddis at 11:18 AM on March 25, 2008

Makes you want to hurl a marble drinking fountain through the window and head out there to straighten things out.
posted by Smedleyman at 12:05 PM on March 25, 2008

The Wikipedia page linked above says that high-level waste would create a wet environment that would corrode waste containers, so maybe that's the answer.

That article also only has citations for the marking system, nothing about the actual storage system.
posted by electroboy at 12:25 PM on March 25, 2008

And they are leaking.

They've been leaking for at least 30 years. Living downriver, I've noticed those little newspaper items.

OTOH, all that government money has made the Tri-Cities area (Richland, Pasco and Kennewick) an oasis of ethnic diversity in Eastern Washington.
posted by msalt at 1:46 PM on March 25, 2008

The problem is that WIPP is "characterized", as they say in the biz, only for low-level radioactivity, not the hot high-level stuff that plagues sites like Hanford. I once asked a few experts whether they knew of a reason why high-level waste couldn't be stored there. They said no, except for politics. The Wikipedia page linked above says that high-level waste would create a wet environment that would corrode waste containers, so maybe that's the answer. But it strikes me as curious that the folks I spoke with, including WIPP engineers and a National Academy of Sciences specialist, didn't know that.
posted by Greenie at 10:21 AM on March 25 [+] [!]

My understanding is that WIPP is intended to take higher levels of waste. It was designed for that purpose and eventually (when it gets the permits or whatever) will take higher grades. My pops works on the WIPP project--it is possible that I've got this all wrong but I think it just gets bogged down in the politics as Greenie mentions.

Funny to see a post on Hanford. I grew up in Richland, WA (one of the Tri-Cities) and nearly every kid I knew had a parent or two working at Hanford. We didn't hear anything bad about it growing up there, I assure you.
posted by fieldtrip at 5:06 PM on March 25, 2008

I'm sure Aesop wrote a fable for this: you pay to deal with a manageable problem now, or you pay a hell of a lot more to deal with a much more dangerous and more difficult to manage problem later. You choose.
posted by binturong

Did he have a fable for: pay a large bill now, or pay a small bill now by cutting all possible corners on safety, thus leading to a hugely disastrous situation which some other poor sod will have to worry about long after I've retired?
posted by ArkhanJG at 5:15 PM on March 25, 2008

Now I think about it there was a futurama episode, "A Big Piece of Garbage" that did indeed address that fable exactly. Ahh, Futurama, is there anything you can't do? Apart from not get cancelled of course.
posted by ArkhanJG at 5:18 PM on March 25, 2008

I dated a chick from the Tricities in college. Here dad worked for the Purex plant at Hanford. They are the guys who, among other things, refined plutonium for nukes. That entire family was nuttier than Christmas fruit cakes. There were pictures of Reagan in every room. Including the bathroom. I got a nicely wrapped good-bye gift from her dad the day we left to go back to school. Which at the time made feel like a dick for thinking how weird they all were. And then when I got back to school I opened it and it was two books. "The Coming Boom" by Herman Kahn and "Atlas Shrugged." A week after that the guy was calling me asking what I thought of the books. Like two three times per week. Jesus Christ. This continued even after I broke up with his freakish daughter until I moved.
posted by tkchrist at 5:46 PM on March 25, 2008

There's a lot of dams upstream on the Columbia River. Better hope none of them fail, or Portland's getting a plutonium milkshake...
posted by anthill at 6:52 PM on March 25, 2008

I grew up in Richland, and everyones parents and grandparents worked out at "the area" as the local jargon calls it.

During the 1960s, once a month a black case that had 2 glass bottles in it were left on the front porch of the men who worked out at "the area." These would be filled up with urine, and the case was left back on the front porch. Someone would come to pick up them up and have them tested. And of course, it was done without question, it was their patriotic duty.

In Kindergarten we had fire drills, and duck-and-cover drills but the most bizarre was us kids being herded single file outside onto the black-top and waiting our turn. We were required to climb into a large, white cylinder device and told to lie very still. I remember men wearing white lab coats and holding clip boards.

I went to Richland High (which was called Col-High when I attended). At that time, there was a very large mosaic nuclear bomb image on the floor in the main foyer. This was where the cool kids would congregate, hanging around the sacred bomb image which was considered their turf. No one was allowed to walk on it, if someone did and got caught, it turned into a weird hazing ritual. The offender was required to get down on their hands and knees and clean the sacred nuclear bomb image with a toothbrush. I made sure to step on it every chance I could.

The cheer leaders all wore cute green and gold outfits with a big NUCLEAR bomb, explosion and the letter R sewn onto them.

Here is a picture of the "school spirit" that I grew up with. There were tons of bomb decoys everywhere at high school and all over Richland. You can see the school logo on the guys shirt.

I absolutely despised my high school with every core of my being, all of us with hand over heart reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to the Gods of Nuclear Energy. The community was always the gung-ho, can-do and loose-lips-sink-ships type of place to live, extremely right-wing to the point of near hysterical fanaticism.

Richland High Alumni:
Wesley Allan Dodd was one of my classmates, he died on deathrow for killing small children. I often wonder if it was the endless bullying from his manly-man jock classmates.

And Sharon Tate, she went to Col-High from 1958 to 1960 and was also crowned Miss Richland.

My mother (age 68) and my grams (age 86) got infected from the iodine-131 and other radioactive materials that Hanford released into the air between 1944 and 1972, and both are required to take prescription pills for their thyroid problems. I left Richland in November of 1980, so of course I was most likely infected but have not seen any thyroid symptoms. Yet.

And just recently, I read about all the radioactive ants, flies and gnats that have been found at the Hanford nuclear complex. Needless to say, I try not to visit very often, it truly gives me the creeps.
posted by MizMadame at 11:21 PM on March 25, 2008 [6 favorites]

> And just recently, I read about all the radioactive ants, flies and gnats that have been found at the Hanford nuclear complex. Needless to say, I try not to visit very often, it truly gives me the creeps.

I just got an email from my friend who works at the Hanford Challenge (she invited me to take photos of the event last week, which inspired this post), with some of the other stories of what went on at the Hanford Site. These are collections from their "true or false" narrative quiz they hosted at the event, all of these stories are the True ones.


Gators!
This is when the alligators escaped from Hanford.
And two, including one irradiated alligator, were never caught.
All this takes place about 40 years ago between 1961 and 1964 at a long-gone animal laboratory near F Reactor.
Available documents consist of a short 1967 Battelle report and two early 1960s Herald articles tucked away at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Hanford's first four alligators came from Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp in August 1961. More dribbled in from a Louisiana alligator farm until Hanford had 33 by March 1962. And more came later until at least 55 were on the site. Most were 2 to 3 years old and 2 to 3 feet long.
Today, no one can say why DOE decided in the 1960s to start testing alligators at Hanford.
Speculation centers on the fact that Hanford already had lots of experience in testing animals, dating back to the late 1940s when soldiers and technicians secretly snuck up to local sheep and cows with radiation counters to check for effects from airborne radioactive emissions.
The alligators stayed in a small manmade pond heated by sun lamps outside the lab near F Reactor. There, Tyler and other technicians took care of them, including feeding them trout.
"We had a lot of fun playing with them," Tyler said. "When we fed them fish, their mouths would open and then snap the fish in two. They were amazing animals to move so slow and have such fast jaws."
A mass gator escape definitely took place – maybe two.
A chain-link fence surrounded the gator pond. The critters burrowed either beneath it or through gaps where the fence sections met.
"You could see the tracks in the sand go out to the river," said one researcher.
Some gators were caught quickly. Some took months to find.
A few months after it escaped, an angler caught a 33-inch alligator on the Franklin County shore about nine miles downstream of F Reactor near Ringold. He put it on display at a local sports shop, but G.E. officials confiscated it when the fisherman was not around.
One control group alligator and one X-rayed alligator were never found.

Pink Tumbleweeds
The Hanford Site is situated in the midst of a vast expanse of rolling shrub-steppe desert. A predominant plant species inhabiting the area is the Russian thistle – commonly known as the tumbleweed. These plants survive this dry climate by sending down deep taproots into the soil until they reach groundwater. At Hanford, that groundwater is often contaminated: thus, the tumbleweed itself sucks up radioactive elements along with the water. The radioactivity lodges in the tissue of the plant.
This presents a problem. The life-cycle of a tumbleweed includes a time when the plant’s mass of above-ground vegetable matter breaks off into a ball and is blown by the winds to new locations, where it can propagate new tumbleweed plants. You now have a handy mechanism for transferring radioactivity from groundwater to the surface – in a hot ball of weed that can travel dozens of miles or more before reaching a final resting point. The hot tumbleweed can contain enough radioactivity to pose a health risk on a chance encounter.
On the theory that wind-blown tumbleweed radiation is not a good safety practice, and at the urging of a local radio-activist named Norm Buske, Hanford began a program to collect and dispose of those tumbleweeds that were deemed too hot to allow to sow their radioactive contents to the world. A team was sent out on the site in a truck to measure the tumbleweeds. Those that were hot were painted pink. Those with no radiation were left alone.
A second truck was dispatched to collect those tumbleweeds that were painted pink. The hot weeds were put into a barrel and disposed of at the local radioactive landfill.
The pink painter team got way ahead of the collection team (due to the requirements for safe handling of the hot tumbleweeds and the repeated trips to the landfill), so Hanford was soon dotted with a landscape of pink tumbleweeds. Then the winds hit.
The Hanford area is subject to periodic, powerful winds that reach up to 70 mph. These dust-ups are called “termination winds” at Hanford because, in the early days of Hanford, so many workers would quit their jobs and leave the area after an encounter with these fierce dust-storms which introduced large volumes of sand and grit into every aspect of their lives.
The strong winds carried many dozens of pink tumbleweeds into the town of Richland and beyond, raising questions among the inhabitants. Rumors circulated, but no official acknowledgement came. Hanford quietly discontinued the practice of marking hot tumbleweeds with pink paint or any other color.

The Gopher
They couldn’t catch the little bugger, that was the thing. It was digging up frickin’ high levels of radioactive cesium-137 and strontium-90 from a huge burial ground used by Hanford to discharge highly-contaminated liquid wastes. And this little gopher was just doing what gophers do – digging, burrowing, tunneling – and in the process spreading radioactive crap to the surface, where it blows around…
The problem was recognized in 198_, when routine surveys of the so-called B/C Cribs – isn’t that a nice term for a burial ground, “crib” – found unusually high-levels of radioactivity in places where it should not be. A quick investigation discovered the source of the problem: the gopher. Solution: capture, or kill, the gopher.
Easier said than done.
Traps, snares, poison – none of it seemed to work. Like an old Walt Disney movie, Hanford’s Elmer Fudds chased the elusive gopher with weeks and weeks of increasing desperation, only to be foiled time and time again.
Finally, after six-weeks, they nailed their man.
posted by mrzarquon at 12:37 PM on March 26, 2008 [1 favorite]

I lived in Richland for almost two years and it was the longest almost two years of my adolescent life. My dad worked for WPPSS (pronounced "whoops"), and I was ever so thankful when he got laid off and we moved back to Oregon. What a godforsaken town, and a soul-killing place to live. The kids there thought they were so freakin' cosmopolitan and cool, and seemed to forget that they were more than two hours' drive from Spokane.

I also think it's quite funny that somebody previously referred to the area as "pristine" and "wonderful." Picture brown hills, with a wide river (the Columbia) running below. No trees, except what the people planted; lots of wind and thousands of seagulls, who are so stupid they followed the river hundreds of miles inland. Add white trash and lots of government money. Equals hell.
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 7:33 PM on March 26, 2008

you pay to deal with a manageable problem now, or you pay a hell of a lot more to deal with a much more dangerous and more difficult to manage problem later. You choose

They. They pay later. Makes the choice so much easier.
posted by falcon at 7:09 AM on March 28, 2008