The Hanford Nuclear Disaster Threat
By James Donahue
Back in the 1940’s when allied and Axis forces were in a race to develop the atomic bomb, the United States went to great lengths to win that competition. We eventually heard about the Manhattan Project that went on secretly in the desert southwest but nothing was revealed for the next 20 years about the Hanford Project, a massive nuclear production complex operated along the Columbia River in Washington State.
While uranium is known as the principle ingredient used in achieving nuclear power, it must be used to develop plutonium before nuclear energy is obtained. Apparently it took the big industrial complex at Hanford to manufacture the plutonium used in producing some 60,000 weapons for the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War years. And that plant produced tons and tons of highly toxic radioactive waste.
While this was going on the entire Hanford project was so top secret that even the workers at the site were never told what they were working on. Before the project was over the plant had expanded to include nine nuclear reactors and five large plutonium processing complexes. Because early knowledge of radioactive waste was yet to be learned government documents now confirm that the operations released large amounts of radioactive waste into the Columbia River, the ground and into the air.
After the reactors were decommissioned at the end of the Cold War, massive amounts of “high-level radioactive waste” were left for disposal. But lacking acceptable disposal sites tons of solid radioactive waste were put on railroad cars and left parked in underground tunnels and gallons of heavy Technetium-99 and uranium contaminated water were left stored in giant tanks on the site.
The Washington Department of Ecology, the US Environmental Protection Agency and US Department of Energy entered into a joint agreement in 1989 to attempt to properly dispose of the contaminants. The removal has been a long, slow and controversial process since nobody wants this material stored in their neighborhood. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years.
On May 9, 2017 a 30-foot section of one of the storage tunnels collapsed leaving a large sinkhole at the heart of the Hanford Site where toxic fumes were escaping. All non-essential personal were ordered to take cover while workers wearing protective suits trucked an estimated 550 cubic yards of soil to cap the hole. The worry has been that a massive release of radioactive isotopes occurred and that additional toxins may still be spewed from the area in the event of future damage. Government agencies have not made the seriousness of this latest contamination public.
An in-depth report in Wikipedia noted that “the plutonium separation process resulted in the release of radioactive isotopes into the air, which were carried by the wind throughout southeastern Washington and into parts of Idaho, Montana, Oregon and British Columbia.” People living in these areas were exposed to iodine-131 and other isotopes between 1945 and 1951. The toxins entered the food chain through dairy cattle grazing on contaminated fields; contaminated fish from the Columbia River and other locally produced and radiated foods.
Radioactive materials have been found to be leaking into the ground water and affecting the drinking water. In 2013 Governor Jay Inslee revealed that as many as six of the tanks storing liquid radioactive waste at the site had been leaking from 150 to 300 gallons per year.
After reports of the Hanford radioactivity began to be made public the Department of Energy chose to declassify 19,000 pages of historical information about the Hanford operation. This brought on extensive law suits by citizens suffering from various forms of cancers including forms of thyroid disease. The Department of Energy paid over $60 million in legal fees and another $7 million in damages.
The Hanford disaster is not going away. As the slow process of “cleaning up” the site, estimated to be half the size of the State of Rhode Island, the problem of finding an acceptable and safe place to store the volumes of radioactive material has made the task extremely costly.
The Trump Administration has proposed a solution. The president wants to reclassify the waste to lower its threat level thus saving the government billions of dollars and decades of work. But just saying the material is no longer toxic does not make it so. The plan now appears be to just leave this deadly material where it now is stored in the ground. That Washington State is subject to earthquakes and volcanic activity makes the Trump plan a very bad idea.
By James Donahue
Back in the 1940’s when allied and Axis forces were in a race to develop the atomic bomb, the United States went to great lengths to win that competition. We eventually heard about the Manhattan Project that went on secretly in the desert southwest but nothing was revealed for the next 20 years about the Hanford Project, a massive nuclear production complex operated along the Columbia River in Washington State.
While uranium is known as the principle ingredient used in achieving nuclear power, it must be used to develop plutonium before nuclear energy is obtained. Apparently it took the big industrial complex at Hanford to manufacture the plutonium used in producing some 60,000 weapons for the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War years. And that plant produced tons and tons of highly toxic radioactive waste.
While this was going on the entire Hanford project was so top secret that even the workers at the site were never told what they were working on. Before the project was over the plant had expanded to include nine nuclear reactors and five large plutonium processing complexes. Because early knowledge of radioactive waste was yet to be learned government documents now confirm that the operations released large amounts of radioactive waste into the Columbia River, the ground and into the air.
After the reactors were decommissioned at the end of the Cold War, massive amounts of “high-level radioactive waste” were left for disposal. But lacking acceptable disposal sites tons of solid radioactive waste were put on railroad cars and left parked in underground tunnels and gallons of heavy Technetium-99 and uranium contaminated water were left stored in giant tanks on the site.
The Washington Department of Ecology, the US Environmental Protection Agency and US Department of Energy entered into a joint agreement in 1989 to attempt to properly dispose of the contaminants. The removal has been a long, slow and controversial process since nobody wants this material stored in their neighborhood. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years.
On May 9, 2017 a 30-foot section of one of the storage tunnels collapsed leaving a large sinkhole at the heart of the Hanford Site where toxic fumes were escaping. All non-essential personal were ordered to take cover while workers wearing protective suits trucked an estimated 550 cubic yards of soil to cap the hole. The worry has been that a massive release of radioactive isotopes occurred and that additional toxins may still be spewed from the area in the event of future damage. Government agencies have not made the seriousness of this latest contamination public.
An in-depth report in Wikipedia noted that “the plutonium separation process resulted in the release of radioactive isotopes into the air, which were carried by the wind throughout southeastern Washington and into parts of Idaho, Montana, Oregon and British Columbia.” People living in these areas were exposed to iodine-131 and other isotopes between 1945 and 1951. The toxins entered the food chain through dairy cattle grazing on contaminated fields; contaminated fish from the Columbia River and other locally produced and radiated foods.
Radioactive materials have been found to be leaking into the ground water and affecting the drinking water. In 2013 Governor Jay Inslee revealed that as many as six of the tanks storing liquid radioactive waste at the site had been leaking from 150 to 300 gallons per year.
After reports of the Hanford radioactivity began to be made public the Department of Energy chose to declassify 19,000 pages of historical information about the Hanford operation. This brought on extensive law suits by citizens suffering from various forms of cancers including forms of thyroid disease. The Department of Energy paid over $60 million in legal fees and another $7 million in damages.
The Hanford disaster is not going away. As the slow process of “cleaning up” the site, estimated to be half the size of the State of Rhode Island, the problem of finding an acceptable and safe place to store the volumes of radioactive material has made the task extremely costly.
The Trump Administration has proposed a solution. The president wants to reclassify the waste to lower its threat level thus saving the government billions of dollars and decades of work. But just saying the material is no longer toxic does not make it so. The plan now appears be to just leave this deadly material where it now is stored in the ground. That Washington State is subject to earthquakes and volcanic activity makes the Trump plan a very bad idea.