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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.
Am I missing something?
Why yes. Yes you are.
This is an opportunity to condemn the US for its reckless cold war behavior. Also, there are obvious and fun equivalences your supposed to make between the Soviet Union and the US. Further, there are tangential green energy angles to this as well, which you should have picked up on by the subtle conflation of weapons production with and energy supply among the icons assigned to the story. These arguments should to be at hand at all times in case some trumpanzee mentions Chernobyl or Kysthym and you need to step in with the necessary whataboutism.
Remember, the US is a xenophobic, homophobic planet wrecking slave state infested by genocidal Christian white life and we're relying on people like you to keep yourself armed with the correct views at all times.
Carry on, Internet warrior!
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
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?
Why, yes: This leak has essentially rendered the new double-walled tank into a single walled tank.
Now, what is the Hanford site most famous for? It's the fact that so many of its single-walled tanks have leaked like sieves. So now we have a new potential sieve.
This is waste from cold-war era weapons production, it has nothing to do with waster from power production.
The dry storage of high level wastes at nuclear plants is actually working fine, because among other things the amount of waste is small, certainly compared to the amount of energy generated. (There isn't another power source that could possibly do this, by the way: "oh well, let's just keep it all here for now".)
You see, you are not some genius who's discovered a problem no one has ever thought about, and no, there is no vast conspiracy to prevent clean-ups of spills.
There is, however an interesting feature planted inside your skull that prevents you from hearing anyone who says anything remotely sensible on the subject-- no doubt we're all shills from the conspiracy, right?