Up To 35,000 Gallons of Nuclear Waste Leak At Washington State Storage Site (rt.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Over the weekend, thousands of gallons of radioactive waste have leaked at a nuclear storage tank in Washington State. One worker called the leak "catastrophic." RT writes, "The Hanford Nuclear Reservation was originally constructed in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project." It produced plutonium for weapons, including the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. The U.S. Department of Energy started removing what was left in the tank in March when workers discovered leaked waste had reached a depth of 8.4 inches. The Department of Energy calls the leak "anticipated," posing no threat to the public. Mike Geffre, the worker who discovered the leak, told King5 News, "This is catastrophic. This is probably the biggest event to ever happen in tank farm history. The double shell tanks were supposed to be the saviors of all saviors (to hold waste safely from people and the environment)." The double-wall storage tank AY-102 has been slowly leaking since 2011. It wasn't until March of this year that the U.S. Department of Energy began pumping the waste leftover in the tank.

Comments

Your Futurama quote for the day

[RenHoek]

Oh, the fools! If only they'd built it with 6,001 hulls! When will they learn?
  -- Fry

mdsolar

[110010001000]

C'mon....mdsolar we know it is you!

I guess what scares me

[rsilvergun]

is we Americans are pretty much ignoring infrastructure expenses. What happens if the outer tank breaks? It's sorta like if my air bags go off. After that I probably want a new car. But to keep up the Car analogy we keep driving it and the next time we're dead.

I'm also reminded of our response to Flint, MI's water crisis. Which is a big "meh". We can't even get a disaster fixed _after_ it happens. So I get nervous when I see a potential disaster that can (for some indeterminate amount of time) be ignored by a country with a long history of ignoring problems...