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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.
A slightly less breathless account is at the Seattle Times:
http://www.seattletimes.com/se...
Some googling suggests that AY-102 is in fact high level waste, targeted for vitrification for ultimate disposal as HLV.
That said, this hype (which, by the way is what one would expect from the sources, a local news station and the Russian propaganda outlet RT) is totally unjustified. And then the Slashdot story makes it even worse, turning 3500 gallons into 35000 gallons.
It's 3000-3500 gallons, leaked from the interior tank into the exterior tank. That's it. It's a known issue that's been around for quite some time - not just since March. And the double hull is doing its job - catching the contents of the inner tank in the event of a leak.
They do need to get the stuff out of there - there is no third hull, and the outer hull doesn't have the air scrubbing of the inner hull. But that's underway.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Until less than three years ago, I worked on the Hanford site. My father in law, still works on the site a regularly oversees and checks on tank levels. At least a couple times a year, there is a minor leak, and the media breathlessly goes screaming that the end of the world is nigh. It is rarely serious, but between the media's antinuclear stance, and the Hanford project's desperate need to drag out the project as long as possible, for jobs, these things get over-reported. At this point, all the waste has been relocated from single shelled tanks to double shelled tanks where it is waiting disposal at their vitrification plant that was recently finished. None of this waste actually leaked anywhere. What it means is that one of the innermost shells on one of the tanks has finally failed significantly. The waste is still contained. This isn't a surprise as even the double shelled tanks are getting old, hence the plan to vitrify (glassify the waste).