Six of Hanford's Nuclear Waste Tanks Leaking Badly

SchrodingerZ writes "A recent review of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state (where the bulk of Cold War nuclear material was created) has found that six of its underground storage tanks are leaking badly. Estimations say each tank is leaking 'anywhere from a few gallons to a few hundred gallons of radioactive material a year.' Washington's governor, Jay Inslee, said in a statement on Friday, 'Energy officials recently figured out they had been inaccurately measuring the 56 million gallons of waste in Hanford's tanks.' The Hanford cleanup project has been one of the most expensive American projects for nuclear cleanup. Plans are in place to create a treatment plant to turn the hazardous material into less hazardous glass (proposed to cost $13.4 billion), but for now officials are trying just to stop the leaking from the corroded tanks. Today the leaks do not have an immediate threat on the environment, but 'there is [only] 150 to 200 feet of dry soil between the tanks and the groundwater,' and they are just five miles from the Colombia River."

Comments

Nothing To Worry About

[Anonymous Coward]

These radioactive leaks are nothing to worry about. All it takes for Congress to actually do something about proper funding, regulations & oversight is a major disaster. How many people have been killed so far? None? Um, well, gee, I guess we'll have to wait until a lot of people die, or a politician or celebrity gets sick.

Re:Nothing To Worry About

[MightyYar]

Unbelievably, the responses so far are that the government wasn't being overseen by enough other government. Of course, then you need government to oversee the government that oversees the government.

Re:Nothing To Worry About

[jbburks]

The problem is: when WW II and the first part of the Cold War were going on, Hanford was underregulated. The goal was to beat the Soviets in the race to build bombs. They should never have put that waste in single-lined tanks with no plan to ever get it out. Now, the site is OVER regulated. The tanks are leaking, but no one will let them take it out of the tanks unless every part of the plan is 150% safe and they have a plan for storing the waste for ten million years. Meanwhile, the tanks are rusting and the waste is leaking. Why not do what we can to get the waste out and stabilized rather than awaiting perfection that will never come.

Re:Nothing To Worry About

[Solandri]

You're cynical about congress. But, people really don't vote for these issues in any kind of numbers. Not when there are much more important single wedge issues to get irate about. Also, people don't want to be informed about this until it starts retarding babies or dramatically increasing cancer rates. And then, they seem to only think it happens to them when it happens to them.

I much more blame the electorate than congress for this lack of attention.

I, the voter, have a full-time job and don't have the time to learn about all these issues in detail. The whole point of electing representatives is that it becomes their job. They can devote the time that I cannot, to learn about these issue in detail so they can make an informed decision on it. Whether it be a vote on a bill, or even just deciding what's important and what's not.

If I were well-informed enough to vote on this type of issue, we wouldn't need to elect representatives. We could just hold a direct electronic democratic vote by the entire electorate on each individual issue.

So it's either a failure by our representatives, or a failure of our system of government. It is not a failure of the electorate.

Unsolvable problem

[Lars -1]

The nuclear waste problem was the biggest driver for germany's nuclear exit decision, for 30 years this was discussed and determined to be basically unsolvable. (The incident in japan led to a re-think of the exit-of-the-exit decision, but the doubts about waste handling had been there at all times).

To me, this is nuclear's biggest threat, and whenever I see discussions on slashdot this does not really seem to be an issue to US citizens at all. Why is this the case? Are these problems properly addressed in school and media? In germany, we have constantly very critical journalism regarding nuclear waste disposal, as we also have a site where waste is leaking and this proves to be a huge and expensive problem. Generally, storing waste for 10.000 years in a safe manner is not considered to be possible. (And think about the costs which occur in those timelines).

When reading slashdot, I always get the impression that people still think nuclear has a future, and that we simply have not got the right technology in place yet. To me, nuclear has been a dead end for years, and its only a matter of time that everyone needs to switch to renewables (which would happen in 20 years max). Is nuclear really considered as a real option by the general US population? Are the implications properly educated? Total costs of waste disposal and storage and the risks which remain?

Regards,
Lars

Re:Yucca Mountain

[MightyYar]

Yucca mountain could not handle the millions of gallons of waste at Hanford, even if you could find a a way to transport it safely. The largest-scale part of the problem is the roughly 10x20 mile patch of contaminated groundwater, for which Yucca would do nothing.

But step back from numbers for a moment and just use some reasoning... if they can pick it up and bring it to Yucca, then it's not an expensive cleanup issue, is it? Sure, it's no fun to build on-site storage - but it certainly doesn't have much to with cleanup.

Killing people by the Millions

[NReitzel]

We shouldn't take Hanford as a prototypical example of "The Nuclear Industry."

Remember, the people who planned, funded, and ran Hanford were in the process of building devices -designed- to kill people by the millions, and designed to be used in circumstances when people, by the millions, were dying here in the USA. Perhaps we should not forgive them, but we should understand their attitude that poisoning a few workers or a few thousand fish was just not on their radar. This was, in their understanding, war.

What Hanford was, and is, is a very brutal view of the simple fact that in war, lots of people are hurt, maimed, killed, poisoned, burned, and other forms of mayhem committed upon them.

Now, we as a nation and as a world, have the responsibility and opportunity to clean up our own mess, a mess that was caused by people who sincerely believed that a philosophical point and an economic model was worth murdering countless people. If nothing else, we need to learn from these experiences. We need to not forget that matters of ideology and economic theory do not count as much as living, suffering humans.