Last week, the Department of Energy, which oversees the aging nuclear site in Hanford, Washington, reported that a tank containing high-level radioactive waste was leaking. This is currently the third tank we know of that’s releasing deadly nuclear waste into the soil above the groundwater that feeds the nearby Columbia River. This is not a new problem for Hanford, which has 177 of these huge underground tanks that contain 55 million gallons of radioactive leftovers from the US’s nuclear weapons operation. These waste tanks were only supposed to hold up twenty-thirty years, and we’re now going on six decades. Below is an excerpt from my book Atomic Days, which details the site’s sordid history and its extremely problematic future. Sadly, leaks at Hanford are nothing new, nor are the lies surrounding them. It’s a looming nuclear danger that’s bubbling in our own backyard, and I’m scared. You should be too.
The first sign of legitimate danger at Hanford, at least when it came to the US public’s attention, occurred in June 1973, when a massive storage unit called 106-T at the complex’s tank farm was confirmed to have leaked 115,000 gallons of boiling radioactive goop into the sandy soil surrounding its underground hull. An investigation by the contractor Atlantic Richfield tried to calm nerves by asserting the atomically charged liquid did not make it into the groundwater supply. “It was predicted that the leaked waste would be retained by the dry sediment above the water table,” the report stated. “The greatest depth to which this liquid waste penetrated is about twenty-five meters below the ground surface, or about thirty-seven meters above the water table.” While the science indicated the contaminants did not leak into the groundwater or into the nearby Columbia River, the incident showed that another such accident, and one of an even greater magnitude, could happen at one of Hanford’s other storage tanks.
What was perhaps most alarming about the 1973 event was that not a single person could say exactly how long 106-T had been leaking or what had caused the tank to crack in the first place. In fact, when administrators eventually realized what was going on, they weren’t even sure what was inside 106-T. There was no panic. No major alert to workers, and not even a pithy press release warning the community about what administrators did or did not know. The secretive culture at Hanford was still alive and flourishing.
Workers had first noticed the problem on a Friday, June 8, 1973. But it wasn’t until Saturday, June 9, that administrators began thumbing through their reports and read-outs in an attempt to uncover what was actually missing from 106-T. Even though pages and entire sections were nowhere to be found, the investigating team was able to piece together what they believed had occurred. For a full fifty-one days, an average of 2,100 gallons of gunk had seeped out of 106-T every twenty-four hours.
In total, 151,000 gallons emptied into the soil, which included forty thousand curies of cesium-137, four curies of plutonium, fourteen curies of strontium-90 and other, slightly less toxic sludge. There had also been numerous leaks at Hanford in the early years. In 1958, fifteen different tanks leaked some 422,000 gallons of a similar nuclear waste by-product. Yet the 106-T was an entirely different animal. The 1973 accident was the largest single radioactive waste disaster in the history of Hanford, if not the United States, and unlike the incidents recorded in 1958, newspapers were finally covering it.
The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which oversaw overseeing operations in 1973, came under scrutiny in the press for the alleged mismanagement of Hanford’s tank farm. “The scope of the problem is staggering,” read a Los Angeles Times investigative piece. “It has been estimated, for example, that there is more radioactivity stored at the single Washington (Hanford) reservation than would be released during an entire nuclear war.”
The 106-T disaster also impacted public perception of the safety of the United States’ nuclear technology. AEC commissioner Clarence E. Larson tried to downplay the accident and his agency’s role in the mess, as well as the “implications that large masses of people are endangered.” Larson, and a governmental report that followed, laid much of the blame on the contractor Atlantic Richfield and a few bad apples inside the AEC.
“The bungling attributed to Atlantic Richfield (which has declined to comment on the report) would be unbecoming for a municipal sewage plant, to say the least of the nation’s main repository for nuclear waste,” wrote nuke critic Robert Gillette in an August 1973 issue of Science, two months after the leak was discovered. He continued:
The problem, according to the report, was that the operators who took the readings did not know how to interpret them; and a day shift supervisor in charge of half of Hanford’s tanks … let six weeks worth of charts and graphs pile up on his desk because of “the press of other duties” he said later, and never got around to reviewing them; and consequently a “process control” technician elsewhere at Hanford, who was supposed to be reviewing the tank readings for “longterm trends” received no data for more than a month. The technician … waited until 30 May to complain about the delays, but he nevertheless emerges as the hero in this dismal story. Fragmentary readings of fluid levels in 106-T arrived in his hands on Thursday 7 June, but it was enough to show that something was amiss. The technician put out the alarm, the supervisor confirmed the leak the next morning after checking his records and promptly resigned. All of this, the report says, led to the discovery that AEC officials had previously failed to notice or fully appreciate.
It was the first time the public became starkly aware of how Hanford’s tank farms were a tragedy in waiting, not only because the tanks were old and unfit to store massive amounts of toxic waste, but because the agency and the contractors assigned to monitor them had failed to do their job. But it wasn’t just humans who had failed. The tanks themselves were unsettling and foreboding. One hundred and fifty of these gigantic underground silos were built on a dusty plateau just seven miles from the Columbia River and only a few feet below ground. Hanford’s early history and conceptions around nuclear power, waste, and safety is imperative to understanding the disaster that lay ahead. A 1948 AEC report foresaw a future fraught with problems associated with these tanks, the way they were built, and their location:
Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent and are currently being spent for providing holding tanks for so-called “hot wastes,” for which no other method of disposal has yet been developed. This procedure … certainly provides no solution to a continuing and overwhelming problem. The business of constructing more and more containers for more and more objectionable material has already reached the point both of extravagance and of concern.
In other words, the tanks were a short-term fix to a problem with no long-term solution. They knew they couldn’t just dump the waste into the Columbia River, so piping the stuff into hulking underground tanks seemed the obvious choice to the engineers of the 1940s. The waste was so hot it would boil, not for hours or days or even months, but for decades to come. Engineers hoped a better remedy would reveal itself down the road. Such are the pitfalls of nuclear waste, and over the years Hanford’s reactors produced unfathomable amounts of this steaming radioactive soup.
JOSHUA FRANK is the managing editor of CounterPunch and co-host of CounterPunch Radio.
Source: CounterPunch
