Hanford Nuclear Reservation Leaking Radioactive Waste into Groundwater
May 5th, 2006 by gordo
Radioactive insects have been found near Hanford reservation
Richland, in eastern Washington, is the town that Oppenheimer built. Since the dawn of the nuclear age, the town’s largetst employer has been the Hanford nuclear reservation, which has produced virtually all of America’s plutonium. Enough to build the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.
This new industry helped the town flourish, and today about 160,000 people live near the 586 square mile reservation. 53 million gallons of nuclear waste lies buried in 177 underground tanks, each capable of holding 750,000 gallons. Some of the waste dates back to the Manhattan Project of the 1940s, and the 53 million gallons of sludge will continue to be dangerously radioactive for about 240,000 years.
The people of the town developed a sort of gallows humor about their role in the Cold War. The high school football team is called the Bombers, and they wear helmets that feature mushroom clouds. But now the joke isn’t as funny as it used to be.
The old tanks of nuclear waste have been leaking for years, releasing as much as 1 million gallons of nuclear waste into the groundwater. Some local plants, cockroaches, wasps, and ants are measurably radioactive. The nuclear waste continues to ooze underground, down toward the nearby Columbia River.
A couple of hundred miles down the Columbia are the cities of Portland and Vancouver, Washington. More than 1 million people drink water from the Columbia. A gigantic hydroelectric plant lies downstream, as well as numerous farms and recreation areas.
In 1987, Hanford stopped making plutonium, and the most expensive containment and cleanup effort in world history began. Politically connected Bechtel Corporation has been building a gigantic facility to process and store the nuclear waste. And now, almost 20 years later, it is beginning again, almost from square one.
Ironically, past negligence, incompetence and greed have saved Richland. The increasingly expensive project, which will have a total cost of more than $11 billion, has been drawn out so long that the area has had a chance to attract normal industries and diversify the economy. If the project can be completed before too much waste reaches the Columbia, the town should continue to prosper.
But that’s no longer a safe assumption. Bechtel built the massive processing and storage facility that the government requested, but it was found to be far too weak to survive a major earthquake. So now it’s being built again.
Time is running out, and the latest estimate for project completion is 2017.
The reaction of the Bush administration has been to propose a resumption of nuclear weapons manufacture, with the goal of producing 125 new nuclear weapons per year by 2022.
(via Carnival of Horror)
Note: While I was looking for a photo of a Richland football helmet, I found that the Army has been sending cheerleading squads to perform at High School football games. There are male and female squads, and they wear fatigues while they jump, clap, chant, do pushups, etc.
The football helmets used to have a better design, with an unmistakably nuclear mushroom cloud, unobscured by the “R.” I was unable to find a photo of an old helmet, though.
(cross posted at appletree)
May 5th, 2006 at 3:27 pm
Do you know what movie that image came from? Them? They?
May 5th, 2006 at 5:09 pm
I wondered why the cockroaches weren’t coming n from the drain anymore…they’ve gotten too big!
May 5th, 2006 at 5:34 pm
At Gentilly, the only nuclear power plant in Quebec, there is an unusual amount of 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 leaf clovers.
May 5th, 2006 at 9:30 pm
No LA, the ants in Them were MUCH bigger. The picture above does not look familiar to me.
Them was one of my favorite monster movies when I was a kid, though I never did understand why they let that small town sheriff go with them to hunt for the beasties in the sewers of Los Angeles.
May 5th, 2006 at 10:28 pm
LA–
That’s a publicity still from a Dr. Who episode called “Planet of Giants.” It was the first episode of the second season, way back in 1964.
You’d be surprised how difficult it is to find a good giant ant picture.
It was also nearly impossible to get a good picture of a Richland Bomber helmet.
May 6th, 2006 at 12:21 pm
Do giant ants make good pets?
May 6th, 2006 at 1:31 pm
Yes, but just don’t mix them with giant rats.
May 6th, 2006 at 5:01 pm
I think the folks in Eastern Washington had better hope that giant ants make good pets.
Seriously, what’s it going to take before we realize that there is no such thing as safely storing nuclear waste? Not only is Bush trying to push for nuclear power plant construction in the US, he’s pushing it worldwide (offer void in Iran and North Korea). On top of that, he wants to start building nuclear warheads again, at a rate of 125 per year. Since the Hanford reactors have already been shut down due to age, I can only assume that he wants to create a similar crisis somewhere else in the US.
May 6th, 2006 at 8:08 pm
Perhaps your next modest proposal will be to ship our nuclear waste to the middle east….
May 6th, 2006 at 10:25 pm
I like the girl in the picture. She reminds me of an old girlfriend. I was trying to figure out who she was. Anyone?
May 6th, 2006 at 11:01 pm
That’s Carole Ann Ford, born 1940. Too old for you, too young for BRT.
She was in 36 Dr. Who episodes, so she appears in a lot of retrospectives and documentaries about the show.
Most recent acting was in Soul’s Ark (1999)
May 7th, 2006 at 3:47 am
We could use the radiation to make mini-george bushes. Like 2 feet tall or something. It’d be like mini-me. Like a tiny retarded midget running around going “Internets!” “mission accomplished lol!!” “nukular!” etc that you could keep as a pet.
Come on, think about it. You come home and george bush has left the water running all day, yells “I R teh compassionate conservitory rofl!1″ and then he runs over and kicks a puppy. Wouldn’t that be adorable? The dumb little bastard.
May 7th, 2006 at 10:03 am
David–
If I had a 2 ft. tall George Bush, I’d invite Fat Bastard over for dinner.
June 18th, 2006 at 7:28 pm
I was wondering why everyone is growing so tall in Richland, WA.
June 18th, 2006 at 7:30 pm
We don’t have to use artifical light at night since we glow, I just can’t wait till we start sprouting wings.
October 2nd, 2006 at 4:15 pm
Joking (black humour) apart, I am working with the Low Level Radiation Campaign in the UK. You might be interested or shocked by my blog at www.isoscelesrules.com.
December 21st, 2006 at 7:42 pm
It is obvious that you don’t know a whole lot about this area. And where did you get that military cheerleader shit? That is messed up. Drop me a line if your interested in understanding this area better.
NOTE FROM MODERATOR JIMMY: I DID NOT POST THIS COMMENT…There’s another Jimmy in the grotto.
December 23rd, 2006 at 9:22 pm
Jimmy–
Actually, I know the area pretty well, having lived just north of the tri cities for a couple of years.
I can’t imagine what you think I got wrong. Are you saying that there is no nuclear reservation? Are you saying that the area hasn’t benefitted from the billions of dollars that the federal government has spent trying to contain the nuclear waste?
As for the Army cheerleaders: as I indicated, this phenomenon was not directly related to the tri cities, but something that I stumbled on as I was looking for photos of the Bombers’ helmets. I had a video, but it’s since been taken down. It’s just a natural extension of the Army Band, but I thought it was interesting.
January 14th, 2007 at 5:26 pm
Has anyone noticed what appears to be a white mushroom cloud out near Hanford. I was driving north on Rd. 68 in Pasco and noticed it. I’m trying to look it up on the net and the only picture I’ve come acrossed doesn’t have the article with it. It’s been mysteriously deleted, and honestly it concerns me.
January 14th, 2007 at 6:09 pm
Dr Who, eh?
I could have sworn that was a young Rock Hudson.
February 2nd, 2007 at 3:02 pm
1943 to present (2007) and the only president named is Bush?
February 3rd, 2007 at 4:54 am
Gee, and all these years I’ve lived in Richland, worked at Hanford, and never once saw a mutant anything. Well, other than this blog. Truly a classic of paranoia! Thanks for the laughs.
February 3rd, 2007 at 5:14 pm
I guess the “mutant” bizness wouldn’t apply to the radioacive tumbleweeds along a fenced stretch of road… or the “tumblemustard (Sisymbrium spp) that was growing out of an abandoned crib, which was so hot (from 10′ away) that it required white suits to harvest- from a distance… or the plume of tritium that’s been heading SE, towards the river, from the 200 area, that I first heard about from 2 women chatting in a grocery line on Geo. Washington Way, back in ‘87. Man O man… in the old days, when the walls had ears (and fervent, principled paranoia in their hearts), their whole families woulda been swept out of town so fast that they wouldn’t have time to grab the old man’s pee sample container off the porch as a souvenir. On the other hand, the most explicit knowledge of nuclear industrial activities that i ever saw was a movie, “A is for Atom” in 1958 at Chief Joseph junior high… it even discussed the near-meltdown at the Arco, Idaho facility in the earlier ’50s. (I wonder if it’s classified, yet?) What I’d love to have is one of the cool, 2-tone (red & black) posters from those days- “Beware the Red Saboteur”- probably worth its weight (if not its gravitas) in cobalt 60… ^..^
February 3rd, 2007 at 6:48 pm
WOW! At least you got the true helmet up on here; complete WITH the R/Mushroom cloud on it. For some time there were some who thought the same as you did–”not so funny anymore”, and had removed it. Then someone else finally came along and realized that we Bombers never did think it was”funny”, and now it is back on there where it should be. We are fiercely proud of our alumni and who we are; complete with the R/Cloud which is a copyrighted logo and does hold a place of esteem in the Smithsonian. Check it out.
And if you want to be cool and glow like we Bombers do, go to my site and buy a glow/cloud shirt and then you will be cool too.
Now if you will excuse me, I need go tend to my ant farm and do the routine feeding–they eat sooooooo much these days. ;o)
February 5th, 2007 at 10:41 am
The white “mushroom cloud” is the steam plume created by the nuclear power generating station out 15 miles in the middle of the desert. It’s not radioactive but does tend to generate its own weather around the plant. In the winter we call it “nuclear snow”. If conditions are right, at night you can see the golden glow of the parking lot lights, even from town.
February 5th, 2007 at 5:26 pm
It’s nice to know that, Nancy.
‘Night.
February 6th, 2007 at 11:51 pm
Bomberbabe–
I remember being kind of pissed off at the PC impulse that led to the logo being scrubbed from the helmets. I’m glad to hear that the cloud is back.
But I’m not so happy to hear that the radioactive waste is still threatening the river. I’m downstream from you.
June 18th, 2007 at 1:51 am
I’m not sure about mutated bugs, but I know about that stretch of fenced highway through the Hanford Reservation. I drive that route every time I come home to visit! I can’t help but giggle when I think of radioactive tumbleweeds. I also know that most of my friends back there in the Tri-Cities have 6 and 7 toed cats. Coincidence? I think not!
But I was a Bomber, and I’m so glad that the cloud is back! Oh, and a little tid-bit I heard in the gossip mill, the Bombers were originally the Beavers for the first couple of years that the high school was in existence.
June 18th, 2007 at 4:10 am
Beavers. Lame.
The good news is that there is now a plan to stop the radioactive waste from flowing into the river: a massive underground wall.
February 7th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
There’s some misleading info in this article. They are not rebuilding the WTP plant–it can hold up to a major quake. The whole earthquake nonsense was based on new studies about the ground below the plant, the plant itself was not misdesigned. This “major quake” is 7.5+ and no such quake that I know of has ever hit central WA like that. If one did happen, Grand Coulee Dam up the road, is going to do more damage and death…but they aren’t rebuilding that now are they. Might as well prepare for meteors, giant ants, and aliens too if we’re worried about once in a million year earthquakes destroying a 50 year project in the middle of nowhere.
Concern is good, but I think the regular joe would be amazed at how complex and full of cement and rebar these buildings are. It’s gotta get built one way or another. Otherwise lawsuits will fly and more money will be wasted.
February 7th, 2008 at 7:01 pm
Worker–
There’s nothing misleading in the article. You say, without evidence, that the Waste Treatment Plant was not misdesigned. In reality, the DOE had to relax its own safety standards in order to approve the project (link):
February 9th, 2008 at 12:09 am
Not So funny? glad to send you a mushroom cloud sticker!
As a proud graduate of Richland High School 1981, it is
funny to read your uninformed, inaccurate, googled information
about Hanford.
Go to school Joel, learn something–or better yet, send
me your high school information, and we’ll do our best
to make fun of you…who gives you the right to dismiss
the graduates, residents and proud inhabitants of this
community?
February 9th, 2008 at 12:14 am
One More Comment…to the person who said it is impossible
to get a good picture of a Richland Bomber Helmet, I’ve
got my old one in the closet..complete with mushroom clouds,
and bomb goal stickers…can send you complete information
where you can buy a whole plethora of Bomber merchandise!
For many years, the green and gold with the mushroom cloud
was feared throughout Eastern Washington as they have
dominated the AAA and now 4A ranks for years.
My father helped design and maintain the electrical
systems on N-Reactor, worked for WWPPS, and I grew up
less than 7 miles from several of the plants–no health
issues here!
February 9th, 2008 at 4:34 am
John–
I’m not sure who Joel is, or why you think the area is immune from groundwater contamination.