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Energy Department Permanently Closes Damaged Hanford Nuclear Reservation Tank (tri-cityherald.com)
The Department of Energy has decided to close the oldest double-shell tank at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The department says that Tank AY-102 has widespread damage and should not be repaired. The Tri-City Herald reports: DOE was required by Ecology, a regulator for Hanford's tanks storing radioactive and chemical waste, to empty enough waste from the tank to determine the cause of the leak by spring 2017. DOE confirmed in 2012 that waste from the inner shell of the tank was slowly leaking into the space between its inner and outer shells. No waste is known to have breached the outer shell to contaminate the soil beneath the tank. One of the goals of the inspection was to decide whether the tank could be repaired and returned to service, a scenario that appeared unlikely. Hanford has just 27 double-shell tanks, excluding Tank AY-102, to hold waste emptied from 149 leak-prone single shell tanks until the waste can be treated for disposal. Plans call for glassifying much of the waste at the vitrification plant under construction at Hanford. The waste is left from World War II and Cold War production of plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons program.
Who's the dumbfuck who place the "Power" icon on this story?
mdsolar
What the fuck is Hanfordâ(TM)s tanks?
Why the fuck /. editors won't do their job??
You modded Mr. MAGA down. Little do you know it actually means Make America Great Again.
For anyone else who doesn't know everything DOE, it is located in southern Washington State.
This would make excellent housing for Seattle's homeless population.
Maybe I'm missing something, but a tank had a leak, but since it is double walled nothing escaped and they agreed to stop using it and have a plan to deal with the waste.
Am I missing something?
Is the fact that the federal government does have competent people in it that can do their jobs really news? I could see maybe if there was a political angle, where despite Trump's best efforts the EPA managed to get significant work done, but it is not even that.
Is there some imminent danger I'm missing?
i'm going to allow it this time
Seriously, nuclear waste from WWII? Sell little fragments of that shit as keepsakes in a special decay absorbing Lexan.
Nuke waste in kinda permanent. Call me in ten thousand years. Oh, wait. My phone won't work in the future.
No matter which comment I tried to mod up to insightful that already was modded insightful it all ends up being modded troll. This is ridiculous censorship of a really important topic to make a political point.
You people that are getting paid to do this, paid shills to control the conversation, should be ashamed of yourselves.
Maybe I'm missing something,
Yes you are. Where do they put the stuff that is in there and how do they get it there? That is a hard problem to solve.
Now they have an unknown deadline before it starts leaking into the groundwater through the last wall. You don't expect the last tank to last forever do you?
That's feasible today. The Tesla battery system recently installed in Australia is already demonstrating how this can work.
Exactly the opposite : renewables have taken off in a massive way precisely because they are technologically and economically superior. That's why renewables generated three times as much power as coal in the UK in 2017. That's why last year the UK had its first coal-free day since the industrial revolution.