nuclear-news

The most radioactively poisoned site in America – Hanford

25 years on at America’s most contaminated nuclear waste site BBC News, Washington 10 June 2014 By Taylor Kate Brown  The town of Hanford, Washington, has long been the most contaminated nuclear waste site in the US. But critics say poor management has put the site in further danger.

When Susan Leckband moved to eastern Washington state to take a job 30 years ago, radioactive contamination was not on her mind.

“I loved my job,” she says.

But it was only a handful of years before the place she worked, Hanford, turned from a plutonium production complex to a massive environmental clean-up site.

For Leckband, the question is not about the past, but the progress made on cleaning contaminated buildings and soil.

“It’s important to the entire Pacific North-West… the food crops, the salmon, the Indian tribes – it’s a huge, huge obligation,” she says.

Situated on a plain along the Columbia River, the Hanford site is where the US produced plutonium used in the Manhattan Project, for the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki, and for a Cold War stockpile………despite some progress, the site’s most complicated and potentially dangerous waste issue – 56 million gallons (255 million litres) of high-level radioactive waste sitting inside tanks at the centre of the site – is facing more problems.

In the mid-1980s, activists and reporters began to unwind Hanford’s history, detailing safety lapses and environmental hazards across the site. ………

Hanford’s daunting clean-up problem in 1989

100 sq miles (259 sq km) of contaminated groundwater
56 million gallons (254 million litres) of liquid waste, in tanks buried just below ground
More than 1,000 ad hoc burial sites of waste
Hundreds of contaminated buildings
450 billion gallons of contaminated water released at ground level……..http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26658719

June 11, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, wastes