by Crane-Station with note: This was also posted on Firedoglake, on Wednesday, 6/19/2013
Newly appointed US Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz is scheduled to be in southeastern Washington State today, for his first visit to the Hanford site. During his April confirmation hearing he told Oregon Senator Ron Wyden that it would be “unacceptable” to maintain the status quo regarding cleanup, at Hanford. With what has come to light only recently about various government contractors pissing up a rope while collecting bonuses as the tanks leak, this is a massive understatement.
Hanford weapons production reactors produced the plutonium for the Trinity implosion-design device fission test in the desert, the Fat Man atomic bomb that was detonated over Nagasaki in 1945, and a nuclear arsenal that includes tens of thousands of warheads. Today, Hanford is home to 56 million gallons of radioactive waste, stored in 177 underground tanks, in sets of tank farms. The amount of waste at Hanford represents two thirds of the nuclear waste in the entire US.
The toxicity of the waste in Hanford tanks is such that the amount of sludge that fits onto the leg of a fruit fly is considered toxic. In fact, dozens of acres of the site have been shut down because fruit flies that first visited some sludge then went to the workers’ dining areas to dine on the food and so, the fruit flies had to be killed.
Hanford has two types of waste storage tanks: single shell and double shell. The single shell tanks that were designed to last twenty years are the oldest; they were mostly made in the 1940s and 1950s. They are made of an inner lining of steel surrounded by concrete, and 149 of them are in trouble. Half have failed and leaked upwards of a million gallons of radioactive liquid into the groundwater that leads to the Columbia River. There is no way to get to a leak underneath one of these giant tanks other than to remove it, and since the government has not shown a whole lot of excitement about doing this, these tanks are being monitored. There are currently six leakers among the single hull tanks.
What has come to the public’s attention recently, through this government report is that a newer double shell tank designed in the late 1960s to last much longer than the single shell tanks, tank AY-102 (in the AY double shell tank farm), is leaking to the annulus. The leak is likely due to some corrosion involving an enormous heat load at the bottom of this particular tank. The leak has escaped the inner wall of its heated home, and now challenges the outer wall of this tank. The annulus is the two-foot hollow space between the layers, and the outer wall is also the last wall. Tank AY-102 has been triaged to importance, because it was supposed to be a feeder tank that held a collection of toxic waste from other tanks, and then piped it to the Waste Treatment Plant for vitrification (processed into a solid and stable glass). AY-102 already holds more than 800,000 gallons of mixed liquid toxic waste.
The problems at the moment are 1) the Waste Treatment Plant does not exactly exist due to multiple design and technical problems and 2) It did not occur to anyone that AY-102, the feeder tank, would ever leak, but it did. Now, the government is saying that it will be another six years or so, before AY-102 can be pumped out. In October of 2011, leak detection instruments showed evidence of a leak, and an alarm went off. The government contractor had no plan in place for this. AY-102 contains, among other things, more of the byproduct Strontium-90 than any other tank at Hanford, and this byproduct has a tendency to sink to the bottom of the tank and then boil everything around it. There was no Alarm Response Procedure (ARP) in place, as the video above explains.
Not only was there no ARP in place from the contractor, the same contractor also spent millions of dollars for futile work to the tank, preparing it for being the ultimate feeder tank that it can never be. Both some of the workers for the contractor as well as the Department of Energy knew this, but the contractor pressed on with unnecessary work anyway. One can not help but assume that it was lucrative in this situation to fiddle while Rome burns.
While Dr. Moniz visits Hanford for the first time and the finger pointing begins, the Hanford ‘downwinders’ with cancer fight for reasonable settlements through the courts, but there is also this:
Taxpayers are footing the bill for the defendants’ legal costs and also for the settlements because of a World War II agreement to indemnify Hanford’s nuclear weapons contractors, including General Electric and DuPont.
Tanks AY-101 and AY-102 under construction at Hanford by RiverProtection on Flickr
UPDATE: On Thursday, the day after Dr. Moniz visited Hanford, workers performed a routine check to the leak detection pit. They have apparently discovered indication that AY-102 is now leaking to the soil. They also took photos of the annulus, the hollow space between the two walls, and found additional material beyond the photos I have posted here, in this post.
On Friday, a whistleblower reported this to CBS, and CBS did a report last night. The link to the CBS report is in my tweet:
Rachel @CraneStation 9h
Possible radioactive leak into soil at Hanford http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57590463/possible-radioactive-leak-into-soil-at-hanford/?tag=socsh … via @CBSNews
CBS report on new AY-102 tank leak, to the soil.
Photos:
Rendering of Hanford Double Shell Tank by RiverProtection on flickr
White material found in tank AY-102 by RiverProtection on flickr
Overview of region by RiverProtection on flickr
end note to clarify: Some folks mistake Hanford for a decomissioned nuclear power plant, but this is not true. Hanford was part of the Manhattan Project, and its reactors produced material for atomic weapons. Plutonium does not really occur in nature for mining purposes. It is reactor made. The byproducts are incredibly nasty.
thanks crane — for the life of me i will never understand the apparent importance of purposefully creating such toxic material when no known disposal method has been developed. how long have we been ‘working’ on disposal issues? have we seen any progress in 60 years? was it worth it? gaaaaah!
my deepest sympathies to all who live in the general vicinity – from the lowly fruitfly to hapless humans.
fauxy, it’s simply industry not needing to clean up. Not about bad economy, the company is doing pretty well on war contracts for rebuilding Iraq, it needs to have your government hold it’s feet to the fire and use some of it’s mega profits, on Hanford, the most toxic site in North America.
The two videos I posted, watch the MSNBC one first, then the scientist who alludes to her own fear that she had to come forward and be protected from those in the company who have an interest in keeping her quiet.
They need to keep the tanks stirred in order to keep things from blowing up or corroding/erroding through the metal and concrete. Stirring seems to be a problem.
Global disaster, not regional. Plutonium et al would have a quick ride into the Pacific Ocean.
Tstas,
My comment is in moderation, didn’t realize there were hyper links in some of the quoted text
The MSNBC report includes several interviews, and they put it best, it’s not a nuclear power plant. Completely different.
Hanford made the radioactive materials for weapons, basically a chemical plant. The safety is separated from the owner of nuclear power sites and regulating bodies. Not so with plants that produce weapons grade nuclear products, like Hanford. The regulators are not separated, the industry regulates itself.
Video report from MSNBC, 2011
“Rachel Maddow: Whistleblower Paying Price for Voicing Nuke Concerns.”
http://www.uiovn.com/video/24mvoACF5XA/the-most-contaminated-site-in-north-america-hanford-nuclear-waste.html
wow
Direct link to Rachel Maddow’s report:
‘The Most Contaminated Site In North America: Hanford Nuclear Waste’
Thanks for the report, Crane.
OUr region is in the drift shadow of Hanford. It reaches a long way north.
Not fun to think about. What was the movie made of the young woman who worked at Hanford and was killed, some speculated to keep her quiet about conditions at Hanford? Paula… or… will have to look that up.
‘Downwinders’ Wiki article.
source
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders
New post up:
I have changed my mind and now support Judge Nelson’s decision
@Crane-Station, excellent, in-depth article.
Thank you.
Humans are SO uniquely unable to deal with all the ramifications of nuclear power over time, especially in a failing economy.
But Hanford was not about nuclear power, it was about producing plutonium for bombs, the Manhattan Project and on though the arms race.
Found this article published in High Country News, 1997. gives an overview of the history and problems of Hanford.
The author is “Karen Dorn Steele has covered Hanford for the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, for 12 years.”
There is a list of resources at the bottom, for anyone wishing to do something, but these are of course, from 1997.
Thank goodness for whistleblower protections, the only way to be safe is to go public it seems.
Anyone remember who the woman was who was an early whistleblower who feared for her life? Was she Paulette?
An excerpt from this article.
http://www.hcn.org/issues/113/3592
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Wow, this is really deep, C-S. I can’t believe I’ve never heard about this. Thank you so much for gathering so much info on this and posting it. There’s so much to digest. I’ll have to read it again, and do some West-like processing. While I do, I have a tangential question (don’t I always 🙂 )
Do you have any idea if this the same type of material being processed/stored in the new TX nuclear waste dump that the TX commission redrew the lines of the Ogallala Aquifer for, so they could approve the site (which they did) that allowed them to put a nuclear waste dump on top of an aquifer that is a main supplier of fresh water to at least 5 plains states? I kind of just assume that it is, at least similar, but I don’t know if I’m thinking apples and oranges or Red Delicious apples and Golden Delicious apples.
Of course we know that TX has such a great reputation for their regulation of their for profit industries… 😦
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/us/sierra-club-fight-over-radioactive-waste-in-texas-heats-up.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0