I have written a number of posts about the problems at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Eastern Washington State. After decades of nuclear weapons research and development with too little concern for the fifty six million gallons of radioactive waste they produced, the struggle to clean up the site has not been going well. Buried single walled tanks of waste are leaking and the double walled tanks that were supposed to replace the single walled tanks are starting to leak. Construction of critical sections of a vitrification plant have been halted after billions of dollars were spent because it was discovered that the current design will not work.
An article was recently published in the Seattle Times a man who "managed the development of environmental impact statements for nine Department of Energy Environmental Impact Statements relating to Hanford operations." The gist of the article was that Hanford had been thoroughly studied and that concern over the waste stored there was overblown. According to the author, if all the waste stored in the tanks were released into the ground, the radioactivity would take at least thirty years to reach the intakes for the Richland municipal water supply and would be below the level considered safe by the Environmental Protection Agency. I accept that this individual and the people he consulted with were competent and professional and they did the best they could at the time with modeling the flow of radioactive waste through the soil and into the Columbia. With respect to the EPA standards for drinking water, there have been some suggestions that the allowed levels of radioactive materials are too high. There is also no mention of bioaccumulation of radioactive substances in the water. Such accumulation could enter the food chain and be a threat to human health.
Activists that are concerned about Hanford have raised some issues that need to be mentioned. As reported previously in my blog, recently there have been public hearings about Hanford because of uranium leaching out of the soil and showing up in the Columbia River. This uranium is left over from millions of gallons of radioactive waste in liquid form being poured directly into unlined trenches near the Columbia River. A great deal of work has been done modeling the processes that determine what amount of uranium should be showing up in the Columbia. However, the models were mistaken and more uranium is showing up than anticipated. At the very least, this should call into question the modeling mentioned by the writer of the article in the Seattle Times.
There is a danger of hydrogen gas being produced by the waste in the underground tanks that could lead to explosions, release of radioactive materials and possible damage to other nearby tanks. This was not mentioned in the Times article.
The article calls for the rapid completion of the vitrification plant. The problem that halted the construction was the fact that the radioactive waste in the tanks varies in chemical composition and physical form. The contents of any particular tank are not well known. Because of the particles of different sizes and the changing viscosity of the contents of the tanks, it has been discovered that trying to run the waste from the tanks through the piping of the vitrification plant could lead to corrosion, leaks and even explosions. In addition, plutonium could form clumps inside the mixing tanks that might be big enough to trigger a spontaneous nuclear reaction.
While I am certain that some Hanford critics are mistaken with how serious the situation is there, I am equally certain that those who say that there is no threat to public health and safety are also mistaken. There is ample evidence that the contents of the tanks are poorly understood and past modeling of ground water movement and industrial engineering have been inadequate.
