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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.
I did a lot of service work in the 200 and 300 areas in Richland and at the Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTR) at the Westinghouse-Hanford sites in the 80's and 90's.
One thing I learned was that the Hanford Patrol would go out weekly into the desert surrounding the 200/300 areas and shoot a few rabbits, which were then brought back for radiation testing. These were informally called "bunny hunts" and "RRT's" ("radioactive rabbit tests", lol).
It was (and still is) a viable way to find leaks of radioactive water from the storage tanks. The tank leaks, the water often pools in a gully or whatever, the rabbits drink the water, and the radioactive elements are easily detected in their blood and organs. If you start finding more than trace amounts then you've got a problem. They found problems more often than you might suspect.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
It seems like the Molten Salt reactors can take a number of different elements.
I just wonder if we can burn up some of these liquid wastes, rather than having them sit around making a mess.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.