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U.S. Nuclear Cleanup Carries Major Risks
Roland Piquepaille writes "New Scientist reports in this pretty alarming article that there is a 50-50 chance of a major radiation or chemical accident during the cleanup of the dirtiest nuclear site in the U.S. There are indeed lots of things to clean at the Hanford complex in Washington state: 67 tons of plutonium and 190 million liters of liquid radioactive waste stored in underground tanks. A third of them, dating from the Cold War, have already leaked 4 million liters in the environment, contaminating the groundwater and a river. Meanwhile, officials at the DOE, who'll spend $50 billion between now and 2035 on this cleanup, seem less worried than the different specialists interviewed by New Scientist. Please read this overview for selected quotes from the article and from the Hanford site. You'll also find a slide from the DOE showing the timeframe for the cleanup."
Mod parent down! He makes it sound like Hanford PR is another Chernobyl, where in reality I get 100x more radiation from a lower GI than I do from eating fish from the Columbia river.
Go hug a tree.
But lunatics, sorry, military, were running the show, and quite frankly the way you hear some of these people, or their political masters, talk makes me thing that the cretin Dubya is a super-genius. But it does look as if some of those who knew of the scale of the problem should have been trying hard for 50 years to communicate it to higher authority. Politicians will tend to leave everything difficult for the next governemt to deal with, if they can get away with it, which seems to have happened here for many political generations. They should have been put on the spot by public exposure, and forced to act, long ago.
The longer we wait, trying to figure out what the hell to do with everything, the more the containers deteriorate. The tree huggers don't want it here, or there, or over there. But by God, you set the whole mess down on the campus of Berkeley, and they'll come right around to a consensus. Obviously, the best solution is to use it somehow. It might not be the cheapest solution, but certainly the safest.
And the last place on the entire Earth that I'd want this stuff is Russia. It would end up coming right back to us, courtesy of some Islamic fundamentalists...