They were just two little words, sprinkled among some 12,000 in an 11-page story.

But they were in the May edition of Scientific American, a pre-eminent science magazine with an English-speaking circulation of about 700,000.

"This tempest in a teapot comes down to the words 'until recently,' when what I meant was 'until several years ago,' " said Glenn Zorpette, a staff writer whose article titled "Hanford's Nuclear Wasteland," angered some tank farm workers.

Zorpette said in his story that until recently, the tank farm was tended by some of Hanford's worst workers. Then the story quoted Roger Bacon as saying it was "a Siberia for a lot of derelicts on the site."

Bacon, a retired Navy admiral and submarine commander who took over management of Hanford's tank system about a year ago, did not recall making that statement.

"He definitely used those words," said Zorpette, a staff writer for the science magazine for about a year. "It's in my notebook and in my scrawl, but entirely legible. My notes don't indicate specifically what he was talking about, but my recollection is that he was talking about a situation that no longer persists." Bacon said the point he was trying to make when interviewed by Zorpette in January was how far tank operations have progressed in the past decade. When Hanford was focused on plutonium production, the tank farms did not get funding or attention needed to make substantial progress.

"In retrospect," said Zorpette, "I should have asked Bacon to clarify how long ago it was when he talked about problems in the tank farms. I should say that in terms of this current controversy, Bacon had nothing but the utmost respect for his people and he clearly believed he's only as good as people who work for him."

"When I used the words 'until recently,' I intended them to mean 'several years ago.' Those two words are being read in a way I never intended," he said.

"If anything, I'd say if I had been more careful about the sentence I wrote leading into the (Siberia) quote ... if I had simply said 'some years ago' rather than 'until recently,' this would not have happened.

"If I had it to do again, would I do it different. Yeah, I would. I feel terrible for him," Zorpette added. "I never thought two words could create such bad feelings ... I should have been more aware."

Westinghouse officials called Zorpette on Tuesday to ask for a correction.

"But I asked, 'What am I going to correct?' This whole thing is, in my opinion, angry, emotionally and politically charged over the interpretation of two words. But this is not the kind of thing we correct."

Instead, Westinghouse officials will submit a letter to the magazine outlining environmental cleanup accomplishments at Hanford, which Zorpette's article largely ignored.