I was born in Kadlac Hospital in the 50s. When I was about 40 I received a package of info from the US Govt warning about the possibility of thyroid cancer. So far, so good. But this can be so much worse.

My sympathies to all in Richland and the surrounding areas.

amount of waste would be helpful...

While there is an operating nuclear reactor in Richland, it is not the cause for the waste in the Tanks. This is old waste from the cold war weapon program. Our reactor has been very safe and has had no major issues. The problem has been with the government coming up with a solution for cleaning up their mess left over from the Manhattan project and the 30 years of nuclear weapon proliferation.

Utility companies have been pushing nuclear energy for decades, claiming it's "clean and safe" There are many aging reactors around the world and I fear the cleanup is going to be a nightmare.

Is that coal fired plants kill thousands every year through air pollution, and are major contributors to climate change.
That alone is not justification for nuclear energy plants, but the thousands who die from breathing in the air full of pollutants and mercury from coal-fired power plants are based on statistical modeling, whereas a nuclear incident is very easy to pinpoint as far as its dramatic negative health effects.
Germany and Scandinavia have about half the sunlight on any given day that we have in the central US, yet they produce a much higher percentage of their power from solar. It is simply a matter of political will and acceptance of the science behind climate change.

The tanks are designed with an inner wall and an outer wall. There is space between the two walls in case of a breech of the inner wall. The leak occurred from the inner wall and the outer wall contained it. Nothing has escaped into the ground.

The workers are in the process of moving the contents of this tank to another tank. That work was halted to move the leak back into the main tank so the space between the inner and outer walls are empty in case of an additional leak.

No problem here.

Bribe paid.

Work done.

EOM.

Thank you.

I didn't say this wasn't a concern, but the leak hasn't reach the actual ground. Which was the question I was answering. I also including information that they weren't ignoring the leak.

This tank has been an issue for a long time. This is why they are in the process of moving the contents to another tank. The AY-102 tank was put in service in 1971 and in 2012 there were 857,000 gallons of sludge and supernatant. As of March of this year, they had moved an estimated 650,000 gallons of liquid from that tank. As of Sunday, before the leak was found, they had the sludge down to 14 inches deep which was approximately 46,000 gallons.

I live near Vancouver, WA, which is down river from Hanford.

We invested in nuclear research in WWII.

We need to invest in solar, wind and research on other possible, SAFE energy sources now.

It's a matter of public will. We have to do this.

It should be our first priority.

We can do this if we put our best scientists to work solving our energy problem.

put up huge roadblocks to solar energy. They are raising fees to be connected to the grid to sell excess power, paying way way below wholesale rates for the excess energy produced. Solar City just pulled out of one of the Western states because they made it unprofitable there overnight! With that type of uncertainty who in their right mind would invest now? I have been looking at starting a solar retail and installation company, only to put it on hold until the climate (pardon the pun) improved.

of corporate America and can understand the real issues that are hazed over by the corporations. We need to move quickly to alternative energy, and those now making profits from fossil fuels need to help pay the way.

Thanks for your post.

about anything other than flattening the fuck out of two Japanese cities in WWII, and building the largest stockpile of strategic nuclear warheads on the planet through the sixties.

This wasn't about keeping the lights on. A lot of the shit in that tank is not produced by commercial nuclear power.

and this additional cost will come out of the already bloated pentagon budget, i am assuming.

..I would bet this is part of the department of energy's budget.
There are far more military industrial complex costs than just the pentagon's budget.

The fact to take away from this is that, even if a specific pile of nuclear waste originally wasn't part of a process designed to initially take lives, it always ends up being part of a process that puts people in danger of their life.

FWIW, live north of there near Spokane.

One, the nuclides that need to be dealt with are totally different. Some are the same, some are simply not produced by commercial reactor power.

The second reason, as a military industrial concern, is the cavalier manner in which it was stored, and people were exposed to it. When people think of human beings and the environment as military assets, shit gets messy quick.

So, please don't lose sight of that. The fact this started as a military project, is of extreme relevance to the current danger to the public.

If the Y-12 building at Oak Ridge caught fire, we should all be shitting our pants for the same sorts of reasons; military byproducts.

but those nuances (please forgive me for condensing to one word), in light of the sheer danger that the current product poses to everyone in my regional area, must be dealt with separately (on a parallel track perhaps) in order to concentrate on the immediate life-threatening problems of high level nuclear waste.

This waste is not dangerous to every living thing?

Just because the waste from the military projects is MORE dangerous is NOT a good reason to feel any safer about the waste from current power plants.

"Relax. They are just venting a little steam.
Nothing to worry about. These new plants are safe because they have redundant back-up systems. They are so safe that we can build them on known Fault Lines and Tsunami Zones."

Just an observation.

..the question that followed the "So" that you FAILED to answer "the Nuclear Waste produced by today's Nuke Power Plants is safe?" is NO Strawman.
That question IS THE question from which you are running.

Are you willing to answer that question, or play more Dodge Ball?

However, commercial reactor waste stored in dry casks is a fuckton safer than that military industrial unregulated who the fuck knows what swill in that containment unit at Hanford.

The people running the place aren't even sure what's in there. The people running Columbia Generating station near Hanford know what the hell is in the spent fuel rods they are responsible for.

Knowing what it is and how to handle it doesn't mean you want to give a fuel rod a hug, but it's a hell of a lot less dangerous than a leaking tank full of shit partially derived from classified nuclear weapons production from as far back as the 30's, without any regulatory oversight.

Do you seriously not see a delta between the two propositions?

Easier to handle?...maybe.
Knowing more about what is in it?...Certainly.
Controlling a massive leak into the Colombia River?....still a major, MAJOR deadly catastrophe.

Can YOU see where your waffling and attempts to make Radioactive Waste seem more palatable is nothing more than Industry Propaganda to give the illusion that modern Radioactive Waste is somehow "safer"?

Would you rather be bitten by a Mojave Rattlesnake, or a Coral Snake?

If you can't even solidly answer the 'easier to handle' question, there's no point talking to you because you're not serious.



Those are dry casks. Those are CLEARLY easier to handle than the muck of unknown quantities and types, leaking in LIQUID form from a tank that was holding hundreds of thousands of gallons of said unknown radioactive shit.

Those dry casks are pretty safe. Something would have to tear them apart to cause problems with the fuel inside, and even then, it would be solid chunks of spent fuel, not a liquid slurry of radioactive shit.

....and put into these casks?

Still not a 'leakage' hazard like the Hanford mess.

From a 'how do things go wrong' standpoint, the pools at fukushima dai-ichi were in critical danger, because of the state of the industrial disaster at the site. Filling the pools would have been trivial, except there was radioactive shit everywhere after the explosions, no power, and the placement of the pools is questionable from a seismic standpoint. That is not universally true of all reactor designs.

Not as bad as Hanford?
That is not very reassuring.
In fact, it IS an admission that there is a potential for leaks into the environment while handling this "modern" radioactive waste, dry casks or not.

Thank You, finally, for the honest answer.

Because nuclear reactors operate with solid fuel rods.

Would you drink it?

I can find out.

the focus on the earthquake risk for CGS is misplaced

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/hanford-nuke-plantrsquos-earthquake-risk-underestimated-group-says/


CGS gets all the media attention but the real vulnerability is those old containment tanks.

industry in general. Even if this specific leak is form the byproduct of militaty uses.

Not in any meaningful sense, other than 'contamination can be borne through groundwater'.

(Nothing is getting out of the second hull of the tank in Hanford... yet.)

whether it comes from a Military source or a civilian source. Simply because the outer shell of the containment tank hasn't started leaking yet is what has no relevance.
The failure of the inner shell demonstrates how UNSAFE our system of containment is,
and should be highlighted in the discussion of this issue and in our population's awareness.

That 'system of containment' is not used for commercial nuclear fuel.

But you know that.

Radioactive toxins are the devil, with many black magical properties.

Much worse non-radioactive toxins that we are all exposed to in our daily lives are unremarkable.

He is a nuclear scientist, with a bias.

On GOOGLE over 16, er, 15 articles.

https://news.google.com/news/story?ncl=dH-RfW2x15qXK7MwBy-5Q-6qIrZSM&q=hanford+plutonium&lr=English&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj8vsHAwJvMAhXhyIMKHaaSA_wQqgIIKjAB

One would think with the public health at stake, they'd try.

Last edited Tue Apr 19, 2016, 07:00 PM - Edit history (1)

RIght on the Columbia River.

If (or should I say "when&quot this poison gets out, say goodbye to one of the most beautiful places in America.
All those wonderful towns along the Gorge will become like Centralia, Pennsylvania...uninhabitable ghost towns.

Um, so now it's time to do something? Somebody tell me why they wait until it's fucking leaking before they do something about it.

No, on second thought, don't tell me.

... they sometimes didn't put the stuff in tanks. Yep, they simply dug a hole and poured it in.

China has similar sites. Of course, they've got places even worse, contaminated with toxins that have a "half life" of FOREVER.

We reached the shore, and looked across the lake. I’d seen some photos before I left for Inner Mongolia, but nothing prepared me for the sight. It’s a truly alien environment, dystopian and horrifying. The thought that it is man-made depressed and terrified me, as did the realisation that this was the byproduct not just of the consumer electronics in my pocket, but also green technologies like wind turbines and electric cars that we get so smugly excited about in the West. Unsure of quite how to react, I take photos and shoot video on my cerium polished iPhone.

You can see the lake on Google Maps, and that hints at the scale. Zoom in far enough and you can make out the dozens of pipes that line the shore. Unknown Fields’ Liam Young collected some samples of the waste and took it back to the UK to be tested. “The clay we collected from the toxic lake tested at around three times background radiation,” he later tells me.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150402-the-worst-place-on-earth

CRAZY!

Been there a month, never even knew the site was there. Yikes.

And on the other side of the country there is "Chernobyl on the Hudson," the Indian Point nuclear plant.

Google only pulls up CT sites, and anti nuke sites. Is there any real info out there?

let's educate our kids to engineer our way out of this lesser of evils energy scheme
you know, like, actually educate, not like "this group studies and this group works at kmart and pretends to study"

1) yes
2) no