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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.
Yes, and you probably thought the o-rings on the space shuttle challenger were working just fine too.
Yes, there is a double tank. But the inner tank was not designed to leak. Whatever happened here sounds like a failure of design and it makes no sense to assume that everything is going to be hunky-dory because you still have the outer tank. Unless you know and understand why the inner tank failed you have no way to predict the behavior of the material in contact with the outer tank.