nuclear-news

Hanford nuclear clean-up will cost $111 billion, but Trump is slashing its budget, anyway

Seattle Times 14th Feb 2018, Sorry, Hanford: Your radiation leaks aren’t as important as tax cuts.
Probably no place in America shows more acutely how incoherent politics has
become than our own Hanford nuclear reservation.

Consider this recent sequence of events at the Western Hemisphere’s most polluted spot:

First, in November, a board that oversees Hanford nuclear-waste cleanup warned
that the effort is so underfunded it has become shoddy and dangerous. More
spending for better work and expertise “is the only way to help avert a
major catastrophe.”

Then on cue, in December, plutonium particles again
contaminated dozens of workers and cars because of shoddy demolition work
at a defunct bomb factory.

Then the federal government put out the most
eye-popping cost revision I’ve ever seen. It found that the cost of
cleaning up tanks of old radioactive waste — the most serious pollution
problem at Hanford — will now run to $111 billion, an extraordinary $61
billion more than predicted just three years earlier.

Then on Monday the president’s budget recommended … slashing Hanford clean-up spending by
10 percent. “It’s a big disconnect with reality, probably as big I’ve
seen,” says Tom Carpenter, of the watchdog group Hanford Challenge.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/sorry-hanford-your-radiation-leaks-arent-as-important-as-tax-cuts/

February 16, 2018 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, wastes