U.S. government proposes 17-year delay in start of Hanford nuclear tank cleanup -- until 2039

[n2doc]

The Energy Department has proposed a 17-year delay in building a complex waste treatment plant at its radioactively contaminated Hanford site in Washington state, pushing back the full start-up for processing nuclear bomb waste to 2039.

The department submitted the 29-page plan in federal court as part of a suit to amend an agreement with the state that requires the plant to start operating in 2022.

A series of serious technical questions about the plant’s design have caused one delay after another. Two of the major facilities at the cleanup site, which resembles a small industrial city, are under a construction halt ordered in 2013 by then-Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

The plant, located on a desert plateau above the Columbia River, is designed to transform 56 million gallons of radioactive sludge, currently stored in underground tanks, into solid glass that could theoretically be stored for thousands of years.

The waste was a byproduct of plutonium production, which started with the Manhattan Project during World War II.

more

http://www.latimes.com/science/la-na-hanford-delay-20151118-story.html

Maybe if they wait long enough it will all decay away

[pscot]

1. I wrote a paper on this for a college course back in the early 70's

The plan was to turn radio-active sludge into glass logs for permanent storage. They would have done it, too, if they hadn't run into an unending series of cost+ contracts that just rendered the problems too profitable to resolve.

[MisterP]

2. many of these sites were built as the perfect burb--Richland, Rocky Flats, Love Canal

Simi Valley and Fernald are also "hot" sites--interesting when the "All-American" (or even whitebread) locus of postwar prosperity overlaps with the "sacrifice zones"

http://www.plutopia.net/