As much as a million gallons of radioactive waste have leaked from Hanford’s underground tanks—more than all of the leaks from all other nuclear facilities in the U.S. combined, according to Tom Carpenter, an attorney and the executive director of Hanford Challenge. The watchdog group represents Hanford workers and whistleblowers.
In a letter to Washington State Attorney-General Bob Ferguson in April, Hanford Challenge alleged that 38 workers had been exposed to vapors since March and urged the state to act where the Energy Department hasn’t. There are currently about 11,000 workers at the site.
Another 20 Years of Failure
Further, contractors at Hanford have had a string of problems, from corruption to failing to meet deadlines. That kind of performance by the Department of Energy and its contractors is why there’s no end in sight to the cleanup, he said.
“The one common denominator there is the Department of Energy and until you change them out as the manager of the cleanup, we’re going to see another 20 years of failure out there,” Carpenter said.
The delays are mainly due to the discovery of new waste, said Cameron Hardy, spokesman for the Energy Department’s Richland, Washington, office. He said most of the contractors now are “high-performing. There was the potential for a lot of abuse in the early years, but things have changed since then.”
The biggest American nuke disaster you never heard of
Geeez, the oligarchy (1%) never tells us (99%) anything. Even though the NSA knows everything. What is up with Steven Chu the Secretary of Energy? Under his leadership we are very close to having another failing regulatory agency turned into a private for-profit operation. Our government is falling short on too many fronts simultaneously for it to be an utter coincidence.
There’s good book on Hanford and a similar site in Russia if you want to know more. http://www.amazon.com/Plutopia-Families-American-Plutonium-Disasters/dp/0199855765
The assembly plant at Rocky Flats Coloradi was so corrup it was raided by the FBI.
Related piece on BookTV this past weekend. Worth a look.
http://www.c-span.org/video/?318586-1/book-discussion-fukushima
Toxic site cleanup has always been a racket. Quickly ratcheting from exceedingly difficult to fucking impossible as the scale of the site increases. Like cancer patients grasping for a cure everyone has always been ready to jump on the latest untested process whether it looked like it’d work or not.
Hanford has always been an unholy mess, and the safety lapses of the private contractors running it were always excused by the demand for production (the demand by the military for nuclear weapons of all types–and, therefore, plutonium–during the `50s, particularly, was truly mind-boggling). By the late `80s, when the DOE and EPA were reassessing how to go about cleaning up the mess, one scientist said, “cleanup? How? There’s 25,000 square miles of radioactive jackrabbit droppings out there.” They also discovered that the Hanford operators had been pumping liquid plutonium waste down injection wells on the site, and thus the old 400-year rule was invoked–it would take 400 years for the waste to reach the Columbia River, and by then, we’d have a solution to the problem (EPRI had produced in 1968 a widely-circulated pamphlet on nuclear power saying that we could expect one “serious” nuclear plant accident every 400 years, and it took only eleven for Three Mile Island to happen). By the late `90s, the plutonium had traveled to within a few hundred yards of the river. Oops.
The problem has only gotten worse since then, because the contractors are treating the clean-up as a cash cow, and the government has let them. At this point, I don’t think anyone expects the site to actually get cleaned up. The government is pretty much throwing money at the problem in the vague and vain hope that they can tell the public that they’re working on it.