New Leak at Hanford Nuclear Waste Site is 'Catastrophic,' Worker Warns

[hunter]

38. In the former Soviet Union they were in such a hurry to build bombs...

... they sometimes didn't put the stuff in tanks. Yep, they simply dug a hole and poured it in.

China has similar sites. Of course, they've got places even worse, contaminated with toxins that have a "half life" of FOREVER.

We reached the shore, and looked across the lake. I’d seen some photos before I left for Inner Mongolia, but nothing prepared me for the sight. It’s a truly alien environment, dystopian and horrifying. The thought that it is man-made depressed and terrified me, as did the realisation that this was the byproduct not just of the consumer electronics in my pocket, but also green technologies like wind turbines and electric cars that we get so smugly excited about in the West. Unsure of quite how to react, I take photos and shoot video on my cerium polished iPhone.

You can see the lake on Google Maps, and that hints at the scale. Zoom in far enough and you can make out the dozens of pipes that line the shore. Unknown Fields’ Liam Young collected some samples of the waste and took it back to the UK to be tested. “The clay we collected from the toxic lake tested at around three times background radiation,” he later tells me.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150402-the-worst-place-on-earth

Three times background radiation really isn't the worst of it. It's the stuff that doesn't reveal itself to the radiation counter that will kill you.

The horrors of our high energy industrial society are all around us. There may be one parked in your driveway. Ordinary gasoline and used motor oil are carcinogens. So are the microscopic particles that lodge in your lungs, spewed out of your car's exhaust pipe or shed by your car's brakes and tires.

I don't know anyone who has been killed by radioactive waste, but I've known many people killed by automobiles, and I've known many natural landscapes destroyed by highways, roads, parking lots, and other automobile enabled "economic development."

Hanford is an expensive mess to clean up, but it's nowhere near the worst place in the world, which is, I think, commuting in stop-and-go traffic on California's 405 freeway or driving anywhere in Mexico City at any time for any reason. But that's just my personal experience. I'm certain there are worse automobile hells, just as there are worse radioactive hells than Hanford.