A new online tool is allowing people to see how radioactive contamination is moving through plumes underground at Hanford, Washington, and other U.S. Department of Energy sites across the country.
At Hanford, millions of gallons of radioactive liquid waste and many toxic chemicals leaked into the ground water from production of plutonium during World War II and the Cold War. Much of the radioactive liquid and toxic chemicals was dumped or injected into the ground in cribs, pits, trenches and injection wells, according to the Washington State Department of Ecology.
Primary contaminants of concern in the soil and ground water under Hanford include uranium, technetium-99, iodine-129, tritium, carbon tetra chloride, chromium, nitrates and strontium-90.
The newly developed online tool is called Tracking Restoration And Closure (TRAC). It maps the plumes and visualizes them as animations on a screen for viewers. Near the Columbia River, blobs of color move and expand depending on treatment of the radioactive plumes.
April Kluever is the Acting Director of Subsurface Closure at DoE Headquarters. She said, “I could imagine somebody who lives along the Columbia River, either as a new resident, new to the area, or they’ve lived there for a while… perhaps they read a newspaper article or they have something that sparks their interest, and they want to know more. There’s this site, Hanford. Or I heard about this in (the movie) Oppenheimer, Hanford. You can go to TRAC and you can learn all of the information.”
Kluever said that all of the data is being uploaded across the DoE complex, and the data updates of the TRAC program will soon be done every year across the Hanford complex.
The tool shows which remediation technologies are being used, where the contaminated radioactive plumes are going and what progress has been made. It will even display the groundwater standard that the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) is trying to meet, and the concentration of radioactive contamination in the plume.
Kluever said. “We have some of the most complex cleanup scenarios in the world, and we know that. We are instituting some of the most cutting-edge technologies to address these most complex scenarios in the world.”
Kluever added that people cleaning up other public or private environmental sites might be able to use the map as a resource, to help understand new technologies that are available, she said.
A three-dimensional view of the map is not available yet. However, the DoE is interested in making the map even more useful in the future, Kluever added.
Kluever went on to say that the DoE hopes to use a similar sort of tool to show soil and closed Hanford tanks of radioactive waste that are being cleaned up in the future.
“We started with groundwater because we had a lot of data and it was relatively easy to show in a visual platform like this,” Kluever said.
The TRAC system cost about $750,000 to start up from 2018 through 2023, and costs as much as $50,000 to maintain each year.