Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2006 10:22:22 -0700
From: Scott Frederick <scott451@gmx.net>
Subject: [KCUTS] Radioactive Leaks and Plumbers at Hanford
Hello Kootenaycuts,
I paid a close mind to this since Hanford is a mere 150 miles away
from the West Kootenays.
Two items of note:
1) There was a severe, wartime shortage of skilled labour at the time
of their construction Doubtless, the lack of tradesman like attention
to detail has had a profound effect on the real quality of the earlier
tanks, specifically their ability contain the contaminants.
2) Some of the hot sludge materials are actually perpetually hot (i.e.
near or about the boiling point of water). There are out-gassing vents
installed into each tank to release the gas pressures that developed
from the various atomic interactions in the sludge.
Hanford is a Soviet-styled nightmare of Chernobyl-like proportions.
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Radioactive Leaks and Plumbers at Hanford
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
The outback of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in eastern Washington
State is called the T-Farm, a rolling expanse of high desert sloping
toward the last untamed reaches of the Columbia River. The T stands
for tanks, huge single-hulled containers buried some fifty feet
beneath basalt volcanic rock and sand holding the lethal detritus of
Hanford's fifty-year run as the nation's H-bomb factory.
Those tanks had an expected lifespan of 35 years; the radioactive
gumbo inside them has a half-life of 250,000 years. Dozens of those
tanks have now started to corrode and leak, releasing the most toxic
material on earth, plutonium and uranium-contaminated sludge and
liquid, on an inexorable path toward the Columbia, the world's most
productive salmon fishery and the source of irrigation water for the
farms and orchards of the Inland Empire, centered on Spokane in
eastern Washington.
Internal documents from the Department of Energy and various private
contractors working at Hanford reveal that at least one million
gallons of radioactive sludge has already leaked out of at least 67
different tanks. Those tanks and others continue to leak and that the
leaks are getting much larger.
One internal report shows the results from a borehole drilled into the
ground between two of Hanford's largest tanks. Using gamma
spectrometry, geologists detected a fifty-fold increase in
contamination between 1996 and 2002. The leak from those tanks, and
perhaps an underground pipeline, was described as "insignificant" a
decade ago. Six years later that radioactive dribble had swelled up
into a "continuous plume" of highly radioactive Cesium-137.
Obviously, there's been a major radioactive breach from those tanks.
But to date the Department of Energy has refused to publicly report
the incident, even though it was reported by their own geologists.
A few hundred yards away, a tank called TY-102, the third largest tank
at Hanford, is also leaking. Radioactive water is draining out of this
single-hulled container and a broken subsurface pipe into what
geologists call the "vadose zone", the stratum of subsurface soil just
above the water table. In an internal 1998 report, the Grand Junction
Office of the DOE detected significant contamination 42 to 52 feet
below the surface and concluded in a memo to Hanford managers that the
"high levels of gamma radiation" came from "a subsurface source" of
Cesium-137, which likely resulted from leakage from tank TY-102".
This alarming report was swiftly buried by Hanford officials. So too
was the evidence of leakage at tanks TY-103 and TY-106. Instead, the
DOE publicly declared that portion of the tank farm to be "controlled,
clean and stable".
No surprises here. The long-standing strategy of the DOE has been to
conceal any evidence of radioactive leaking at Hanford, a policy that
was excoriated in a 1980 internal review by the department's Inspector
General, which concluded that "Hanford's existing waste management
policies and practices have themselves sufficed to keep publicity
about possible tank leaks to a minimum."
Needless to say, the Reagan years didn't augure a new forthrightness
from the people who run Hanford. Seven years and several congressional
hearings after the Inspector General's report was released,
bureaucratic cover-up and public denial were still the DOE's
operational reflex to any disturbing data bubbling up out of Hanford's
boreholes. By 1987, Hanford officials had learned an important lesson
in the art of concealment. The easiest way to avoid bad press and
public hostility was to simply stop monitoring sites that seemed the
most likely to produce unpleasant information.
It is now clear that the tanks began leaking as early as 1956, only a
few years after the Atomic Energy Commission began pumping the
poisonous sludge into the giant subterranean containers. It is also
clear that the federal government covered up evidence of those leaks
since the moment it learned of them.
How many tanks are leaking? How far has the contamination spread? The
DOE isn't talking. It isn't even looking for answers. But geologists
estimated that the faster migrating contaminants, such as uranium,
will move from the groundwater beneath Hanford's central plateau to
the Columbia in something around 25 years. That means that the first
traces of radiated water could have started seeping into the Columbia
in 2001.
This reckless strategy persists. In a document called "Official
Characterization Plan of Hanford" -essentially a kind of 3-D map of
contamination at the site the DOEchose not to include Cobalt-60, a
highly radioactive material that is present at deep levels across the
tank farm. In addition, the Hanford plan fails to mention the fact
that its own surveys have shown large amounts of Cesium-137 and
Cobalt-60 forming radioactive pools in the geological stratum called
the plio-pleistocene unit, the last barrier between Hanford's soils
and water table.
If the DOE remains locked onto this courseit will never acknowledge or
even investigate the potentially lethal flow of radioactivity toward
the great river of the West. That's because the managers of Hanford
say they will only research potential leaks if they detect a level of
contamination several times higher than that ever recorded at Hanford
a standard clearly designed to shield them from ever having to pursue
any subsurface leak investigation or publicly admit the existence of
such leaks.
To help Hanford's managers avoid ever discovering such embarrassing
leaks, the site plan calls for them to drill the penetrometer holes,
through which contamination is measured, only to a depth of 40 feet
or two feet above the bottom of the tanks, guaranteeing that they will
avoid picking up any radioactive traces from the region of the most
dangerous contamination.
There's a reason the Hanford managers want the public to believe that
most of the contamination at the site is limited to the surface
terrain. Theoretically, the topsoil can be scooped up and, with large
government contracts, transferred to a more secure site or zapped into
a glass-like substance through the big vitrification center now under
construction. There's no way to de-contaminate groundwater or the
Columbia River. Their only hope for containment is to contain the
issue politically by plumbing the leaks from whistleblowers.
There's no question that the subsurface leakage is serious, extensive
and dangerous. The internal survey of Hanford by the Grand Junction
Office detected high levels of C-137 deeper than 100 feet below the
surface and 60 feet deeper than the current plan calls for probing.
That report concluded that both C-137 and CO-60 had "reached
groundwater in this area of the tank farm".
Consider this: C-137 is a slow traveling contaminant. How far have
faster moving radioactive materials, such as uranium, spread? No one
knows. No one is even looking.
The DOE and Hanford's contractors want to close down the C Quadrant of
the tank farm and declare it cleaned up, even though more than 10 per
cent of the waste at that site remains in tanks with documented leaks.
There is mounting evidence that a plume of Tritium-contaminated sludge
has recently penetrated the groundwater there as well.
John Brodeur is one of the nation's top environmental engineers and a
world-class geologist. In 1997, after a whistleblower at Hanford
disclosed evidence that the groundwater beneath the central plateau
had been contaminated by plumes of radioactivity, Hazel O'Leary
commissioned Brodeur to investigate how far the contamination had
spread. It proved to be a nearly impossible assignment since the DOE
and its contractors had taken extreme measures to conceal the data or
avoid collecting it entirely.
Now, nearly ten years later, Brodeur has once again been asked to
assess the situation at one of the most contaminated sites on earth,
this time for the environmental group Heart of the Northwest. His
conclusions are disturbing.
"There remains much that we don't know about the subsurface
contamination plumes at Hanford," says John Brodeur. "The only way to
solve this dilemma is to identify what we don't know up front and get
it out on the table for discussion. This is difficult to do in the
chilling work environment where bad data are commonplace, lies of
omission are standard practice and people loose their jobs because
they disagreed with some of the long-held institutional myths at
Hanford."
Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like
Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of
Corruption and Profiteering from the War on Terror. He can be reached
at: sitka@comcast.net.
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Only 973 organising days until the next BC provincial election.
Best regards,
Scott mailto:scott451@gmx.net
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