Part 1 of 5 Parts
     I have often blogged about the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in south central Washington State. It is one of the most radioactive sites on the whole planet. During World War II and the Cold War, plutonium was produced at Hanford for use in the creation of nuclear warheads. A great deal of radioactive liquids were just poured into trenches dug in the dirt. Over two hundred million gallons of toxic radioactive sludge was created while Hanford was making plutonium and a great deal of it is currently held in one hundred and seventy seven huge underground tanks, some of which are leaking. The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) has been working on a giant glassification plant for years. They want to embed some of the tank waste into glass logs for permanent burial. The work being done at Hanford is the biggest environmental cleanup effort in the world.
     The tanks of sludge and the contaminated soil are not the only radioactive hazards at Hanford. There are also almost two thousand capsules of very radioactive cesium and strontium. The two radioactive isotopes are stored in cylindrical double-walled, stainless-steel capsules that weight about twenty-four pounds each. In total, the capsules contain about one third of the radioactivity at Hanford.
      The capsules have been stored in a building called the Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility (WESF) for decades. They sit under about thirteen feet of cooling water in concrete basins lined with stainless-steel. The water around the capsules glows blue with Chrenkov radiation which is generated by particles traveling faster than light travels in water.
     The WESF was built in 1973 with an intended life span of thirty years. The facility is far beyond that time span now. In 2013, a team of nuclear specialists from neighboring Oregon warned Hanford officials that the concreate walls of the cooling pools had lost structural integrity because of the constant bombardment of gamma radiation from the capsules. Hanford is only thirty-five miles from the border between Washington and Oregon. The Columbia River runs right next to the Hanford Reservation. After it passes Hanford, the Columbia continues on past Oregon farms and fisheries and eventually runs through Portland which is the biggest city in Oregon.
     In 2014, the DoE’s Office of the Inspector General decided that the WESF posed the greatest risk of a serious accident for any DoE facility that is operating past its original design life time. If a severe earthquake occurred, the disintegrating concrete basins containing the capsules could collapse and allow the cooling water to drain away. In that eventuality, the capsules would overheat and break apart which would release radioactive materials. The ground and air around the WESF would be heavily contaminated and parts of Hanford might become too radioactive to enter. The radioactivity released could even find its way to nearby cities.
      Dirk Dunning is an engineer and retired Hanford expert for the Oregon Department of Energy. He was one of the team that expressed initial concerns about the integrity of the concrete cooling pools at the WESF. He said, “If it’s bad enough, it means all cleanup essentially stops. We can’t fix it, we can’t stop it. It just becomes a horrible, intractable problem.”
Please read Part 2 next