The messy history of the Hanford Reservation radioactive mess

.At The Hanford Nuclear Reservation, A Steady Drip Of Toxic Trouble by Eric Nusbaum Feb 24, 2013 Eric Nusbaum tours the largest environmental cleanup operation the United States government has ever undertaken.”,,,,,,,,Late in 2010, crews with the contractor Washington Closure Hanford were set to begin demolition on what had once been the most radioactive structure on the site: Building 324. Located less than half a mile from both the city of Richland and the Columbia River, Building 324 housed a pair of “hot cells,” which are three-story enclosures that scientists use to perform remotely-operated tests of highly unstable materials. One of those cells, B-Cell, was so radioactive in the 1990s that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that “an unprotected person standing inside could have received a fatal dose in less than two seconds.” By 2010, the building’s worst radioactive material had been removed. But when Washington Closure Hanford tested the ground under the site, it found radiation levels significantly higher than surrounding soil, which itself was already contaminated. Needless to say, demolition on Building 324 has not resumed. The site is “currently being deactivated,” says the Hanford website.

There are similar stories to tell about buildings all over the site, messy stories about government bureaucracy and highly radioactive equipment and the troublesome permanence of nuclear waste. The process of producing plutonium at Hanford required the constant transport of highly unstable materials from one facility to another to another, which made containing the mess basically impossible.

The plutonium production process began in the reactor cores, where uranium rods were overwhelmed with neutrons so that their chemical composition changed, creating, on each rod, a trace amount of plutonium. The rods were then dumped into giant pools of water, which caused some of the radiation to decay away, further isolating that plutonium. Next, the irradiated rods were hauled by train to a place called the T-Plant, where they were exposed to a chemical cocktail that caused them to dissolve, and which allowed scientists to extract the plutonium. The gallons upon gallons of highly toxic chemicals left over from this process were stored in massive single-shell tanks. The plutonium was sent to a place called the Plutonium Finishing Plant.

When Hanford stopped producing plutonium for good in the late 1980s, it was left with more than 100,000 irradiated rods that had yet to be dissolved at the T-Plant. With nowhere to put them — Hanford’s last working reactor shut down rather abruptly after the Chernobyl incident — officials settled on the K Basins, a pair of million-gallon, water-filled tanks that were built in the 1950s. The K-Basins are located about 400 yards from the Columbia River. By the 1980s they were already in decay — not built to last more than 20 years, and not built to store such high level nuclear waste. It didn’t take long for crews to discover that the basins were leaking. Further, the rods inside were dissolving into the water, resulting in yet another variety of nuclear sludge. Crews spent a decade removing the 2,100 tons of as-yet-un-dissolved rods, and then three more years vacuuming 47 cubic yards of sludge out of the more damaged East Basin, and dumping it in the less damaged, and now retrofitted, West Basin. Today, the rods are sitting in a building at Hanford, awaiting vitrification and eventual storage at a national repository to be determined…….http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/24/at-the-hanford-nuclear-reservation-a-steady-drip-of-toxic-trouble.html

February 25, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | history, USA, wastes

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