...as a nature preserve.
At Chernobyl we still have "an exclusion zone" meaning human habitation is more or less prohibited, with emphasis on the "less" in recent years.
We have no such thing at Hanford. The place is crisscrossed by trucks and construction equipment dedicated to the "clean up." There are obscene things like the 4000 cement trucks I described in the "828 nuclear tests" post to contain a tiny potential exposure to technetium. I believe there is a considerable staff at the site, most of whom live in Richland. (PNNL is also there; they do considerable non-nuclear scientific work; I'm very impressed with some of the mass spectrometry work that's come out of there.)
The good news is that today - and I'm very sure it had nothing to do with my post - the DOE and the Washington State EPA agreed to let two leaking tanks leak for a while longer on the grounds that they are no threat to people or to the Columbia River. It's probably wise to monitor the site, but I think vast sums of money for "remediation" are not warranted.
If radioactive materials ever get to the Columbia River, and it's possible that some, notably pertechnate may do so over the centuries, the concentrations will be well below actionable levels of concern. As for cesium, quite a bit of it has decayed while people contemplate what exactly should be done about it. I like that some has been recovered for use, but I'm not particularly concerned about the remainder. The plutonium isn't going anywhere, and there isn't all that much neptunium, even if it moves.
None of these materials are going to do jack shit.
Afterall, the ocean contains roughly 500 billion curies of radiopotassium, and has since it's formed. Every living thing depends on potassium to survive, and every sample of potassium on earth is radioactive.
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