Virgil
10-17-2008, 03:02 PM
http://counterpunch.org/stclair10172008.html
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Weekend Edition
October 17 / 20, 2008
A Trip to America's Most Toxic Place
Inside Hanford
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Richland, Washington.
The outback of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in eastern Washington State is called the T-Farm. It’s a rolling expanse of high desert sloping toward the last untamed reaches of the Columbia River. The “T” stands for tanks—huge single-hulled containers buried some fifty feet beneath basalt volcanic rock and sand holding, the lethal detritus of Hanford’s fifty-year run as the nation’s H-bomb factory.
Those tanks had an expected lifespan of thirty-five years; the radioactive gumbo inside them has a half-life of 250,000 years. Dozens of those tanks have now started to corrode and leak, releasing the most toxic material on earth—plutonium and uranium-contaminated sludge and liquid—on an inexorable path toward the Columbia River, the world’s most productive salmon fishery and the source of irrigation water for the farms and orchards of the Inland Empire, centered on Spokane in eastern Washington.
Internal documents from the Department of Energy and various private contractors working at Hanford reveal that at least one million gallons of radioactive sludge have already leaked out of at least sixty-seven different tanks. Those tanks and others continue to leak and, according to these sources, the leaks are getting much larger.
One internal report shows the results from a borehole drilled into the ground between two of Hanford’s largest tanks. Using gamma spectrometry, geologists detected a fifty-fold increase in contamination between 1996 and 2002. The leak from those tanks, and perhaps an underground pipeline, was described as “insignificant” a decade ago. Six years later that radioactive dribble had swelled up into a “continuous plume” of highly radioactive Cesium-137.
Obviously, there’s been a major radioactive breach from those tanks, but to date the Department of Energy has refused to publicly report the incident. Even though it was reported by their own geologists.
A few hundred yards away, a tank called TY-102, the third largest tank at Hanford, is also leaking. Radioactive water is draining out of this single-hulled container and a broken subsurface pipe into what geologists call the “vadose zone,” the stratum of subsurface soil just above the water table. In an internal 1998 report, the Grand Junction Office of the DOE detected significant contamination forty-two to fifty-two feet below the surface, and concluded in a memo to Hanford managers that the “high levels of gamma radiation” came from “a subsurface source” of Cesium-137, which likely resulted from leakage from tank TY-102.”
This alarming report was swiftly buried by Hanford officials. So, too, was the evidence of leakage at tanks TY-103 and TY-106. Instead, the DOE publicly declared that portion of the tank farm to be “controlled, clean and stable.”
No surprises here. The long-standing strategy of the DOE has been to conceal any evidence of radioactive leaking at Hanford, a policy that was excoriated in a 1980 internal review by the department’s Inspector General, which concluded that “Hanford’s existing waste management policies and practices have themselves sufficed to keep publicity about possible tank leaks to a minimum.”
<snipped>
==================
Weekend Edition
October 17 / 20, 2008
A Trip to America's Most Toxic Place
Inside Hanford
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Richland, Washington.
The outback of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in eastern Washington State is called the T-Farm. It’s a rolling expanse of high desert sloping toward the last untamed reaches of the Columbia River. The “T” stands for tanks—huge single-hulled containers buried some fifty feet beneath basalt volcanic rock and sand holding, the lethal detritus of Hanford’s fifty-year run as the nation’s H-bomb factory.
Those tanks had an expected lifespan of thirty-five years; the radioactive gumbo inside them has a half-life of 250,000 years. Dozens of those tanks have now started to corrode and leak, releasing the most toxic material on earth—plutonium and uranium-contaminated sludge and liquid—on an inexorable path toward the Columbia River, the world’s most productive salmon fishery and the source of irrigation water for the farms and orchards of the Inland Empire, centered on Spokane in eastern Washington.
Internal documents from the Department of Energy and various private contractors working at Hanford reveal that at least one million gallons of radioactive sludge have already leaked out of at least sixty-seven different tanks. Those tanks and others continue to leak and, according to these sources, the leaks are getting much larger.
One internal report shows the results from a borehole drilled into the ground between two of Hanford’s largest tanks. Using gamma spectrometry, geologists detected a fifty-fold increase in contamination between 1996 and 2002. The leak from those tanks, and perhaps an underground pipeline, was described as “insignificant” a decade ago. Six years later that radioactive dribble had swelled up into a “continuous plume” of highly radioactive Cesium-137.
Obviously, there’s been a major radioactive breach from those tanks, but to date the Department of Energy has refused to publicly report the incident. Even though it was reported by their own geologists.
A few hundred yards away, a tank called TY-102, the third largest tank at Hanford, is also leaking. Radioactive water is draining out of this single-hulled container and a broken subsurface pipe into what geologists call the “vadose zone,” the stratum of subsurface soil just above the water table. In an internal 1998 report, the Grand Junction Office of the DOE detected significant contamination forty-two to fifty-two feet below the surface, and concluded in a memo to Hanford managers that the “high levels of gamma radiation” came from “a subsurface source” of Cesium-137, which likely resulted from leakage from tank TY-102.”
This alarming report was swiftly buried by Hanford officials. So, too, was the evidence of leakage at tanks TY-103 and TY-106. Instead, the DOE publicly declared that portion of the tank farm to be “controlled, clean and stable.”
No surprises here. The long-standing strategy of the DOE has been to conceal any evidence of radioactive leaking at Hanford, a policy that was excoriated in a 1980 internal review by the department’s Inspector General, which concluded that “Hanford’s existing waste management policies and practices have themselves sufficed to keep publicity about possible tank leaks to a minimum.”
<snipped>