Deadly Nuclear Waste Leaking From Nation's Largest Nuclear Storage Facility In Washington State

Saturday, May 04, 2013 by: Chris Sumbs

(NaturalNews) “Hanford Determines Double-Shell Tank Leaked Waste From Inner Tank.” This headline on a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) press release from last October is bigger news than it first appeared. For the first time, the massive storage tanks built to hold some of the most radioactive nuclear waste in the world were found to be slowly leaking.

The United States campaign to build a giant arsenal of nuclear weapons during the Cold War created an environmental disaster at Hanford Site in Washington State. Highly radioactive sludge being leaked threatens to contaminate the region’s water supply.

In February, federal and state officials said six giant underground tanks holding a toxic brew of highly radioactive wastes are leaking at the 570-square-mile Hanford Reservation. The location of this nuclear waste site is right on the Columbia River in South Central Washington State.

Dirtiest nuclear waste stored at the Hanford Site

Hanford is known as the dirtiest reactor site in the world. It has 1,000 inactive dumps, 200 square miles of contaminated ground water, and 50,000 drums of plutonium wastes in temporary storage. For nearly 40 years, Hanford’s eight production reactors made plutonium for hydrogen bombs for the US Military. During that process, contractors dumped plutonium, cesium, technetium, tritium, strontium and other isotopes into the air, soil, and ground water. More astonishingly, they even dumped nuclear waste directly into the Columbia River – the drinking water source for downstream cities.

Hanford has 54 million gallons of the high-level waste liquids and sludge contained in 177 aged and decrepit storage tanks. Back in the 1980s, the DOE disclosed that up to 69 of the million-gallon tanks may be leaking. February’s disclosure makes 75; six are confirmed leaking.

The human fallout

In 1990, a DOE analysis of radiation exposures downwind from Hanford found that infants and children were heavily contaminated because of drinking contaminated milk. The Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project found that 13,500 people may have received doses over 33 rads of iodine-131 and that infants and children closest to Hanford could have consumed between 650 and 3,000 rads. A single rad can cause thyroid cancer and other illnesses.
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