For the past two days I have been posting about the problems at Hanford with respect to the collapse of the soil above a railroad tunnel filled with radioactive railway cars and contaminated equipment. There have been a flurry of stories since the cave-in two days ago and I thought that I would add some additional information to my coverage of the story.
Yesterday, I talked about the declaration of a state of emergency at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation by the U.S. Department of Energy because the ground above a railroad tunnel had subsided. The tunnel contained radioactive railroad cars that had been used to carry spent nuclear fuel from Hanford reactors to the Plutonium Uranium Extraction Facility (PUREX).
I have often blogged about the one hundred and fifty acre Hanford Nuclear Reservation in south central Washington State. After decades of nuclear weapons development which ended around 1990 with the end of the Cold War, the Hanford site is one of the most radioactively polluted areas on Earth. The U.S.
Plutonium is produced in conventional nuclear reactors. The plutonium can be treated as waste and disposed of. It can be extracted from the spent nuclear fuel and be used to create new mixed uranium/plutonium fuel. It can also be extracted, refined and used to produce nuclear weapons. Combined civilian and military stockpiles worldwide probably exceed five hundred tons.
