Nuclear Waste Leaking at ‘American Fukushima’ in Northwest
Nuclear Waste Leaking at ‘American Fukushima’ in Northwest
The Hanford Nuclear Reservation sits on the plains of eastern Washington, where the state meets Oregon and Idaho. This is open country through which cars pass quickly on the way to the Pacific coast or, conversely, deeper into the heartland. The site is nearly 600 square miles in area and has been largely closed to the public for the past 70 years. Late last year, though, it became part of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park , which will allow visitors to tour B Reactor, where plutonium for one of the two atomic weapons dropped on Japan in World War II was produced.
This was a hopeful turn for a place that, for four decades, stocked the American nuclear arsenal. A total of nine reactors operated at Hanford, and though they are now decommissioned, the reactors have left behind 56 million gallons of radioactive waste. That a place so tainted with radioactive material could become parkland was a positive sign.
Not quite, it seems, with recent reports indicating new breaches in the tanks holding the nuclear waste. Workers on the site have been sickened too, suggesting that the rush to designate Hanford as a park may have been premature.
The 177 underground tanks were never a permanent solution, and the government has hired private contractors to build a plant that will solidify the waste and prepare it for permanent safe storage. The project will cost an astonishing copy10 billion, according to estimates, making it what many believe to be the most expensive, and extensive, environmental remediation project in the world. Completion is about five decades away.
When I visited Hanford in 2013, construction of the Waste Treatment Plant —which will pump nuclear sludge out of the tanks and turn them into a hardened, glasslike substance—was slow and rife with technical challenges. Whistleblowers, meanwhile, were alleging that private contractors had neglected safety and engineering concerns in their rush to complete the job. Otherwise sober observers likened the place to a nuclear tinderbox. “America’s Fukushima?” asked the resulting Newsweek cover story.
The question remains disturbingly open. Of the 28 newer double-shelled tanks, AY-102 was already known to be leaking toxic sludge into the soil. Now a second double-shelled tank, AY-101, is believed to be leaking as well, according to a report by Seattle news station KING 5 . A contractor’s memo obtained by the station acknowledges “the possibility that the material is from tank waste that has escaped from the primary shell of the double-shell tank.” That material likely includes radioactive isotopes like cesium-137 and strontium-90, though nobody really knows the exact composition of the sludge in each tank. But everyone is certain that their escape bodes poorly for the thousands who live and work in the Tri-Cities area of Washington State.
Those worries were further compounded late last week when 11 workers at Hanford became ill due to vapors emanating from AY-102, the leaking double-shelled tank.
The ill workers and revelations about the second leaking tank are likely to dampen enthusiasm about Hanford’s unlikely return to nature. In the wake of the most recent revelations, a nuclear-energy historian warned on the liberal site CounterPunch that “at Hanford we have the threat of a radiological explosion or terrorist act that could release volumes more radiation than was released by Fukushima...and spread radiation across the West Coast and mountain west.”
This is an unwelcome development for one of the nation’s newest national parks. Maybe the federal government was cavalier in this designation: It’s hard to enjoy nature when the possibility of man-made disaster looms.
Reprinted with permission from Newsweek .
Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2016/05/14/nuclear-waste-leaking-american-fukushima-northwest-164460
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Sadly this is a large part of a problem across the US.
It's not a matter of if, but when.
This relic from WWII (Hanford) has been leaking for decades. It is THE #1 superfund site. Yet nothing ever seems to get done about it. Despite all the rhetoric over the years.
Besides, why do we still need a plutonium factory? We have enough plutonium in storage to make bombs for the next 200 years.
How well is it guarded. All of that plutonium is bound to be ripe for stealing by terrorist groups and putting it on the world market.
EGAD!!! Double walled tanks are great for kerosene and diesel fuel, but not so hot for nuclear waste. All those walls are made of metal, and metal breaks down in nuclear waste. This is NOT a surprise.
Many years ago, they were going to mix the nuclear waste with concrete, and store the squares in a deep mine in Nevada. Whatever happened to that idea?
I was living in Nevada at the time, and the outrage and uproar from the citizens was deafening. It's been halted and is in court now if I remember correctly, Dowser.
Everyone knows we have to safely store it somewhere for hundreds of years, but everyone also says NIMBY. Not In My Back Yard. Deep mines make the most sense, but don't we already have place out West the government carved out of a mountain and is storing nuclear waste in barrels there?
Thanks, Kavika!
I believe, at the time this was originally proposed, not that many people lived there... That has certainly changed now!
Many years ago, they were going to mix the nuclear waste with concrete, and store the squares in a deep mine in Nevada. Whatever happened to that idea?
Yucca Mountain, near Tonopah in Nye County Nevada. Was approved and funded in 2002, it was defunded by an amendment to the Department of Defense and Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, passed on April 14, 2011.
The GAO has stated that the ending of the project was due to political reasons, not scientific, engineering or safety reasons.
Obama has been trying to close the project down since 2009.
Why? We have to put it somewhere safe... I'm all agog, here...
It is stupid if you ask me, yes we have to do something with it.....
Another site with all the information on what is going on with Yucca Mountain, both historically and current.
Eureka County, Nevada - Nuclear Waste Office
I believe that Yucca Mountain as a NWDS is dead.
Of course it was political.
The outcry from the citizens (myself included) against it was overwhelming.
Much like the open pit mine that they wanted to dig along I-15 and St. Rose Parkway which was within a mile of large Henderson communities.
It was also stopped.
Ok, not in your back yard, then that raises the question,
IN WHOSE BACK YARD?
Yucca Mountain was located in part of the Nevada Nuclear test range, which is part of the Nellis weapons range.
Where is a better place to put it than a place that is already nuclear contaminated for the next ten thousand years?
That is a question that should have been asked and answered before we started using this fuel, not decades later.
They could put it at Hanford, seems that it's pretty much contaminated for the next ten thousand years.
Yes it should have been answered way back in 1942. Not like we wouldn't have won the war without it you know.
But we didn't understand all the ramifications of it back then.
WE do today.
I believe that Hanford was taken off the list cause it sits right next to the Columbia River, which means any leakage, (like they are dealing with now) has a direct pathway to over 5 million people. A veritable environmental holocaust.
Much riskier site than Yucca Mountain.
NWM we've understood the dangers of it 50 years ago, yet blindly went on and on. Now we have it buried all over the U.S. and everyone wants it out of their back yard. It's a quandary since no one wants to store it.
Any place that is chosen will fight it.
Nevada has 300,000 abandon mines. 50,000 are considered a danger to the public and around 18,000 have been secured/corrected.
The on going legacy of blindly following a policy that never took the environment into consideration. It's now biting us in the ass.
WE are in absolute agreement my friend.
But we also have to move forward.
Something HAS to be done before we wind up killing millions.
Maybe use a load lifter rocket and shoot it out to deep space.....
Just another reason for the aliens to eradicate us.
No doubt something has to be done. The problem is what can be done, no one wants it.
I vote against shooting into outer space, aliens have a tendency to shoot back and they probably developed nukes centuries ago...We are doomed.
We have a nerve gas repository here in Lexington, KY... Until it, too, began to leak, and they've moved it out. To where, I don't know. But, we have a lot of rain, and that may be one reason that it leaked... I don't see why they don't dig out a giant hole in the Borden Formation-- a mix of greenish shale, limestone, and UGH that has no water in it, and put some of it in there. If it collapses, which it will, the shale breaks down into clay and would seal it up. Having drilled it, there is NO water there.. 800' thick formation, up under the New Albany shale, which is about 300' thick. Also a water-less formation... It just seems to me that, geologically, there has to be somewhere to put this stuff, where it can stay, and naturally be protected and prevented from spreading...
I don't blame the Nevada people for not wanting it in their back yards. Yet, we have this nerve gas repository in LIMESTONE that is water soluble and has all kinds of water going through it. Seems to be that the Border Formation, in the Knobs region, would be a good place for this awful stuff. The Borden is a huge formation, that is at the surface in the Knobs region, but dips down and is very deep a bit west of Louisville. Low population, etc. It just seems to me that there has to be an answer to this...
The problem may have been what label to put on the dangerous material . It would have be understood by future generations for 10,000 years .
Here is another legacy of that time period. Yet the general pubic knows little about it.
The federal government is cleaning up a long legacy of uranium mining within the Navajo Nation — some 27,000 square miles spread across Utah, New Mexico and Arizona that is home to more than 250,000 people.
Many Navajo people have died of kidney failure and cancer, conditions linked to uranium contamination. And new research from the CDC shows uranium in babies born now.
Mining companies blasted 4 million tons of uranium out of Navajo land between 1944 and 1986. The federal government purchased the ore to make atomic weapons. As the Cold War threat petered out the companies left, abandoning more than 500 mines.
Maria Welch is a field researcher with the Southwest Research Information Center , which is working with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state and local groups to gauge the impacts of uranium on Navajo families today. She surveys Navajo families for the Navajo Birth Cohort Study , which has 599 participants so far.
When they did the mining, there would be these pools that would fill up. And all of the kids swam in them. And my dad did, too.
Maria Welch, a Navajo researcher studying the effects of uranium contamination
On a recent day in Flagstaff, Ariz., she asks a mother about feeding practices for her baby. Forty percent of the tribe lacks running water. Welch learns that the mother mixes baby formula with tap water.
One of the study's findings: 27 percent of the participants have high levels of uranium in their urine, compared to 5 percent of the U.S. population as a whole.
Welch, who is Navajo, got involved in the study because of her own family's exposure to uranium. Both of her parents grew up next to mines, even playing in contaminated water.
"When they did the mining, there would be these pools that would fill up," she says. "And all of the kids swam in them. And my dad did, too."
Many Navajo unwittingly let their livestock drink from those pools, and their children play in mine debris piles. Some even built their homes out of uranium.
Maria Welch is a researcher studying the impact of uranium mining on Navajo families today. She also has a personal interest: Both her parents grew up next to mines. Laurel Morales/KJZZ hide caption
Maria Welch is a researcher studying the impact of uranium mining on Navajo families today. She also has a personal interest: Both her parents grew up next to mines.
Laurel Morales/KJZZAll four of Welch's grandparents have died, and she worries about her parents' health and now her daughter's. Cancer rates doubled in the Navajo Nation from the 1970s to the 1990s.
"Why isn't there more of an outrage? Why isn't there more of a community sense of what the heck is going on? How did this happen? Why is this still occurring? Why hasn't anything been done?" she asks.
George McGraw, a human rights advocate working on the Navajo Nation, has one answer.
"Problems like this really disproportionately affect low-income communities of color," says McGraw, whose organization DIGDEEP is raising money to dig wells on the reservation.
"Flint (Michigan) might feel really far away from the Navajo Nation in rural Arizona. But when you look at the demographics of it , it really isn't," he says. "This is a community that has found themself voiceless."
The U.S. Justice Department has recently gone after some of the mining companies. Since 2008, the Environmental Protection Agency has hauled away thousands of cubic yards of mine waste and has rebuilt nearly 50 contaminated homes, says EPA Regional Administrator Jared Blumenfeld. But there's still much more to be done.
"We're spending a lot of time making sure that the polluters pay, so it isn't the federal taxpayer," he says.
One company, Anadarko Petroleum, and its subsidiary Kerr-McGee recently paid $1 billion to the Navajo Nation for cleanup and as compensation to people living with the effects of uranium contamination.
But one-third of the mining companies have shut down or have run out of money. The federal government knew about some of the dangers decades ago, but only started the cleanup in recent years.
"We understand that there's frustration," Blumenfeld says. "We share that frustration that some of this takes a long time."
And the uranium issue on the Navajo Nation is part of a much bigger problem. Across the western United States there are more than 160,000 abandoned hardrock mines — thousands of which continue to pollute.
Unconscionable!
''Unconscionable!'' without a doubt, Dowser.
Dowser, here is more information on the Church Rock spill. Read this and you'll really be pissed off.
The Church Rock uranium mill spill occurred in the US state of New Mexico on July 16, 1979, when United Nuclear Corporation's Church Rock uranium mill tailings disposal pond breached its dam. [1] [2] Over 1,000 tons of solid radioactive mill waste and 93 million gallons of acidic, radioactive tailings solution flowed into the Puerco River , and contaminants traveled 80 miles (130 km) downstream to Navajo County, Arizona and onto the Navajo Nation . [2] The mill was located on privately owned land approximately 17 miles north of Gallup, New Mexico , and bordered to the north and southwest by Navajo Nation Tribal Trust lands. [3] Local residents, who were mostly Navajos, used the Puerco River for irrigation and livestock and were not immediately aware of the toxic danger. [2]
The accident is frequently described as having released more radioactivity than the Three Mile Island accident that occurred four months earlier and was the largest release of radioactive material in U.S. history. [2] [4] [5] [6] The spill contaminated groundwater and rendered the Puerco unusable by local residents. The governor of New Mexico refused the Navajo Nation 's request that the site be declared a federal disaster area , limiting aid to affected residents. [7] The event received less media coverage than that of Three Mile Island, likely because it occurred in a lightly populated, rural area. [8] Some scholars suggest there were elements of class and racism to the neglect as well, since it affected primarily poor Native Americans. [5]
In 2003 the Churchrock Chapter of the Navajo Nation began the Church Rock Uranium Monitoring Project to assess environmental impacts of abandoned uranium mines; it found significant radiation from both natural and mining sources in the area. [9] The EPA National Priorities List currently includes the Church Rock tailings storage site, where "groundwater migration is not under control." [10]