Plutonium Dust Released from Closed Hanford Nuclear Weapons Site
April 16th, 2018Via: Los Angeles Times:
As crews demolished a shuttered nuclear weapons plant during 2017 in central Washington, specks of plutonium were swept up in high gusts and blown miles across a desert plateau above the Columbia River.
The releases at the Department of Energy cleanup site spewed unknown amounts of plutonium dust into the environment, coated private automobiles with the toxic heavy metal and dispensed lifetime internal radioactive doses to 42 workers.
The contamination events went on for nearly 12 months, getting progressively worse before the project was halted in mid-December. Now, state health and environmental regulators, Energy Department officials and federal safety investigators are trying to figure out what went wrong and who is responsible.
Nuclear power is just not worth the danger. At least not on Earth.
Reminded me of this:
https://www.cryptogon.com/?p=43035
I once got to go out there because I’m at DOE and a tribe was putting RFID tags in small salmon for statistical purposes (the largest population of Chinook in the Columbia spawns by Hanford because it is undammed). This is where they developed atom bombs for the Manhattan project, and somehow there are contaminated sites everywhere. They eminent domained a town, and a few relic trees and buildings are still there. There is also an active power plant there too. There is a whole industry of DoE contractors who have been cleaning up that area for decades and it always feels like they have barely made a dent. I don’t quite understand. https://get.google.com/albumarchive/117273058003263536480/album/AF1QipPurgrdwWP2Rjys3yykaMQst2F2SOwSwrueFxcr?source=pwa&authKey=CLvqyfzN9cOKUA