Posted on 02/23/2013 5:13:02 AM PST by RummyChick
Six underground tanks that hold a brew of radioactive and toxic waste at the nation's most contaminated nuclear site are leaking, federal and state officials said Friday, prompting calls for an investigation from a key senator.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said the leaking material poses no immediate risk to public safety or the environment because it would take a while — perhaps years — to reach groundwater.
But the leaking tanks raise new concerns about delays for emptying them and strike another blow to federal efforts to clean up south-central Washington's Hanford nuclear reservation, where successes often are overshadowed by delays, budget overruns and technological challenges.
Department of Energy spokeswoman Lindsey Geisler said there was no immediate health risk and said federal officials would work with Washington state to address the matter.
Will this appease those of you around that site???
I know people on this site claim that all nuclear facilities are safe in the US.
THIS is an outrage!
Why hasn’t the government (EPA) shut down the government facility???
there is more info at the link
I don’t see a problem here....just hook up a water system, with a pipe leading from the affected area to Governor Inselee’s house. When the governor finally says he’s had enough....then we will know it’s time to get worried.
There are processes that will turn liquids and their contaminants into resins
Ike plastic beads. This vaslty reduces environmental contamination.
It’s not clear where the water is going by that article.
Inslee does say
“He also stressed the state would impose a “zero-tolerance” policy on radioactive waste leaking into the soil.”
article:
Cleanup is expected to last decades and cost billions of dollars.
Yes, BUT
“Much of that money goes toward construction of a plant to convert the underground waste into glasslike logs for safe, secure storage. The plant, last estimated at more than $12.3 billion, is billions of dollars over budget and behind schedule. It isn’t expected to being operating until at least 2019.”
I knew some people who worked on a remediation project for Leaking Underground Storage Tanks.
That was an interesting acronym.
And the contract will most likely go to the very same union that built and installed the tanks in the first place.
May take years...May not...But one thing is certain...It WILL reach groundwater...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14738272
from 2003
Cancers among residents downwind of the Hanford, Washington, plutonium production site.
This article says it is leaking into the ground
Also
“Before the last of the pumpable liquids were removed from single-shell tanks in 2004, an estimated 1 million gallons of waste leaked or spilled from the tanks and their distribution systems. Some of that has reached the groundwater, but movement from central Hanford to the Columbia River — five miles away — is slow.”
The federal government already spends $2 billion each year on Hanford cleanup — one-third of its entire budget for nuclear cleanup nationally. The Energy Department has said it expects funding levels to remain the same for the foreseeable future, but a new Energy Department report released this week calls for annual budgets of as much as $3.5 billion during some years of the cleanup effort.
http://www.startribune.com/nation/192588151.html?page=2&c=y
Scrub the emissions at the exhaust.
A one time increase in cost (to a car/truck) distributes the cost .. ummm ... fairly .. to the consumer consuming "fossil fuels"
Nukes for the navy ships and subs, solar for the high school science fair, wind to pump wells and let's get on with REAL progress ...
Like anti-gravity belts ... and skateboards and flux capacitors.
Hell, we've accomplished just about everything RODDENBERRY could dream up.
It will reach groundwater—
Not if we move the groundwater!
Dry up the Columbia or divert it. Dig a channel to the Rio Grande and give it to Mexico, that’s only fair. The US stole the Rio Grande Water I’m sure.
That will turn Eastern WA into a completely barren desert. It is Conservative anyway, and all it does is produce a lot of food-so what difference does it make?
Sounds shovel-ready to me. Contact the EPA.
OMAHA — A nuclear reactor, idled for almost two years by a laundry list of problems, is coming under increased regulatory scrutiny because of some bad math in its 40-year-old design and the use of Teflon, which tends to disintegrate when exposed to high radiation.
.
Help me here.... The Federal Government gets a free pass.
No problem here...
Let me tell you about how dangerous the leakage is. My sister and brother-in-law lived in Richland, Washington and they both worked for Hanford, he at the plant and she in town. They had four boys. My brother-in law worked in the building that had a leak, by the way. This was 50 yeaars ago.
But that wasn’t the beginning of exposure to radiation for my brother-in-law. During WW II he had fought across the Pacific and was waiting in the Phillipines to invade Japan when they dropped the atom bomb, and two weeks later he was in Nagasaki doing guard duty.
After the war they lived in Longview, Washington and he fished for salmon in the Columbia River, whose water was contaminated by a leak upstream at Hanford. And then of course he got the job at Hanford.
Neither of them got cancer, nor did their 4 boys who are still living. My sister and her husband died of natural causes in their 70s and 80s. Their thyroids didn’t work properly, but that is easily fixed. The little matter of them all glowing in the dark is now being studied
Washington is a liberal state, nuff said.
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