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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."
Pretty much. I live there. Don't work there but have lots of friends who do. The leak has been known for a while and this story is just finally starting to reach critical mass (ha!) now that we have a new governor that takes it more seriously. The immediate solution is for them to stop cutting funding -- we have 2/3rds of all the high level waste spills here and we get 1/3rd of the cleanup money. It goes back and forth we red tape and lawsuits with the contractors not meeting goals because they don't have funding, so the govt tries to penalize, they try to sue back due to lack of funding... nothing gets done.
A *real* solution here involves our politicians getting off their asses and coming up with a permanent storage solution, which will never happen. Nobody wants that in their back yard. The vitrification plant? I have a friend who's a lead engineer out there and they're making it up/solving problems AS THEY GO. They're not even sure if it's going to work yet! There's no detailed plan, although to be fair that's how the Manhattan project ran in the first place.
Also, Hanford was much more than refining the plutonium for the Fat Man bomb. In fact that reactor is clean, they give tours now (I've been inside it). They invented the process and refined the majority of the stuff for everything in our nuclear arsenal now, and it had several experimental reactors out there to test breeder reactors, fast flux reactors, making medial isotopes, etc. A few of which were never even finished.