nuclear-news

Radioactive waste cleanup has hardly begun

Radioactive waste cleanup has hardly begun

Mother Nature Network 21 April 09 “……………………..This 586-square foot relic is the Hanford site—a retired plutonium production complex that the Department of Energy (DOE) considers to be “the world’s largest environmental cleanup project.” Some 525 million gallons of radioactive waste were generated by Hanford between 1944 and 1988, according to a Government Accountability Office report, and at least 56 million gallons of the stuff remains on site in leaky tanks. Already a million gallons of it has seeped into the ground and contaminated the Columbia River. Meanwhile, the DOE is stalling on the clean up and trying to wiggle out of its 2018 commitment for completion. “They’re trying to avoid the option of having to build storage tanks, which are very expensive, but the cost of a catastrophic tank failure is incalculable,” says Robert Alvarez, senior scholar for the Institute for Policy Studies…………………………………Disturbingly, Hanford isn’t a lone case. America’s fear of Communism, its doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, and its subsequent nuclear weapons buildup over a 45-year span left behind a nationwide toxic waste legacy: 1.7 trillion gallons of contaminated groundwater, 40 million cubic meters of tainted soil and debris, more than 2,000 tons of radioactive spent nuclear fuel, more than 160,000 cubic meters of radioactive and hazardous waste, and more than 100 million gallons of liquid, high-level radioactive waste, according to Max S. Power, author of America’s Nuclear Wastelands: Politics, Accountability, and Cleanup.

“The nuclear arms race left us with 16 major and 100 minor sites all around the country that need to be cleaned up,” says Power.

“Our ‘nuclear wastelands’ are a multi-generational legacy.” Sites across the US include Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, and the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island in New York, to name a few.

Radioactive waste cleanup has hardly begun | MNN – Mother Nature Network

April 23, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, wastes