Six tanks now said to be leaking at contaminated Hanford nuclear site

[spanone]

The Hanford site in eastern Washington is considered one of the most contaminated locations on Earth.

The leaking of radioactive liquids at the Hanford, Wash., Nuclear Reservation is more extensive than previously reported, with six storage tanks affected, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said Friday.

In a conference call with reporters Friday after a meeting with Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Inslee disclosed that six of the 177 tanks were leaking at the nuclear facility in Richland, in eastern Washington about 50 miles southeast of Yakima.

Inslee said Chu told him that evaluation system of the tank levels wasn't used correctly, raising the prospect that there may be even more leaks. But he said he was told that there was no immediate threat, a point the Energy Department reiterated in a statement Friday evening.

Hanford — which houses millions of gallons of radioactive waste left over from plutonium production for nuclear weapons — is already considered one of the most contaminated sites on Earth, the U.S. government says.

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/22/17060321-six-tanks-now-said-to-be-leaking-at-contaminated-hanford-nuclear-site?lite

[malaise]

1. K & R

[spanone]

3. g'marnin' to ya malaise!

[rucky]

2. Here's some background - Bechtel built this, btw.

and 14 billion dollars of tax money so far in it's construction...

http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/650932.pdf

which will probably exceed 77 billion when all is said and done - (from a 2009 report)

http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-09-913

So now we need a cleanup program to clean up the cleanup program.

[DFW]

4. "No immediate threat"

Just like Deepwater Horizon and Fukushima. No immediate threats there, either. No one had to wait long, though.

[JohnyCanuck]

5. K & R n/t

[cilla4progress]

6. Disgusting. My 'hood.

My husband plans to canoe it this Spring! Trying to talk him out of it!

[spanone]

7. minuscule amount of media coverage on this

googled the title in 'news' and got 4220 'results'

hardly a blip in the google world.

[bvar22]

8. Relax!.. They're just venting a litttle steam.

Nuclear Power is perfectly safe.
They have redundant back up systems, you know.

[Sienna86]

9. Sad

We don't treat our home planet very well. Can't even fathom how this can be remedied, but I hope some brilliant minds come up with a decent solution.

[secondvariety]

10. Like the song says,

"someone's been a bit untidy."

[condoleeza]

11. My daughter spent a summer working for ODFW in Hermiston

just downriver on the Columbia from Hanford. ODFW paid a bounty to fishermen to catch squawfish and it was her job to take the fish and report how many had been caught. The squawfish feed on baby salmon. She was a biology major and had spent a term at the Marine Biology Unit of U of O down near Coos Bay, Oregon.

She fairly quickly noticed missing eyes, extra fins, etc. on the squawfish and contacted ODFW about it and asked if they would like her to keep data on the fish. They said no, she still did and by the end of the summer 28% of the fish she checked in had some sort of mutation. It was years after that that they finally announced they had a problem.

Hanford is a ticking time bomb, the rate of cancer in the Spokane area is astronomical. My sister-in-law's Dad was a guard there. He would often call home and tell his wife to put the kids in the house and close all the doors and windows. All 5 in her family have had cancer, her parents died of it, the kids are still alive, but it's been hell. Another friend, in a family where all 4 kids were adopted, also has a 50% occurrence of cancer, the Dad and my friend and her brother, none of whom are biologically related.

Ron Wyden was up there this week, imagine we'll be hearing much more about this now.

[davidn3600]

12. Its where safety comes first

At least according to the sign...

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