Hanford Nuclear Reservation in the news - now there are 6 underground radioactive waste tanks are leaking - a big jump from the announced one leaking tanks from just days ago ! How many more of the 1777 tanks are going to be found leaking or will imminently start to leak ? And here is a kicker - if the sequester kicks in , work at Hanford could actually stop - at best , the work will proceed slower as layoffs will occur !

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-02-22/radioactive-waste-leaking-washingtons-hanford-nuclear-reservation

Radioactive Waste Is Leaking From Washington's Hanford Nuclear Reservation

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/22/2013 18:30 -0500

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And now for a quick lesson in government spending: in the 1940s the federal government created the now mostly decommissioned Washington's Hanford Nuclear Reservation as part of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. During the Cold War, the project was expanded to include nine nuclear reactors and five large plutonium processing complexes, which produced plutonium for most of the 60,000 weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Sadly, many of the early safety procedures and waste disposal practices were inadequate, and government documents have since confirmed that Hanford's operations released significant amounts of radioactive materials into the air and the Columbia River.

The weapons production reactors were decommissioned at the end of the Cold War, but the decades of manufacturing left behind53 million US gallons of high-level radioactive waste, an additional 25 million cubic feet of solid radioactive waste, 200 square miles of contaminated groundwater beneath the site and occasional discoveries of undocumented contaminations that slow the pace and raise the cost of cleanup. The Hanford site represents two-thirds of the nation's high-level radioactive waste by volume. Today, Hanford is the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States and is the focus of the nation's largest environmental cleanup.The government spends $2 billion each year on Hanford cleanup — one-third of its entire budget for nuclear cleanup nationally. The cleanup is expected to last decades. It turns out that as Krugman would say, the government was not spending nearly enough, and moments ago Governor Jay Inslee said that six underground radioactive waste tanks at the nation's most contaminated nuclear site are leaking.

From AP:

Inslee made the announcement after meeting with federal officials in Washington, D.C. Last week it was revealed that one of the 177 tanks at south-central Washington's Hanford Nuclear Reservation was leaking liquids. Inslee called the latest news "disturbing."

The tanks, which already are long past their intended 20-year life span, hold millions of gallons of a highly radioactive stew left from decades of plutonium production for nuclear weapons.

The U.S. Department of Energy said earlier that liquid levels were decreasing in one of the tanks at the site. Monitoring wells near the tank have not detected higher radiation levels.

And some more lessons on government spending:

Central to cleanup is the construction of a plant to convert millions of gallons of waste into glasslike logs for safe, secure storage. The $12.3 billion plant is billions of dollars over budget and behind schedule.

See: if only the plant was hundreds of billions, or better yet, trillions of dollars over budget, funded entirely by the Fed's monetization of debt issuance of course, all would be well. Sure enough:

Inslee and Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber have championed building additional tanks to ensure safe storage of the waste until the plant is completed. Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon said earlier this week that he shares their concerns about the integrity of the tanks, but that he wants more scientific information to determine it's the correct way to spend scarce money.

What is this "scarce money" he is talking about? Does he not know that today total US debt just hit a ridiculous all time high $16,608,318,357,376.54, which is $20 billion more than yesterday, and at this point is an absolutely meaningless number? It's not like anyone holds any hope that the US will repay this debt ever.

Then again, if the Columbia river ends up spawning some cool-looking mutants, and if the Canadians start turning violent over concerns that the US is exporting them a little more radiation than they bargained for, then the resulting civil/Canadian war once the US can no longer funds its trillion+ deficits will be all the more colorful and vibrant.

So let radiation leak: in fact print more money to buy more Made in Fukushima plutonium and bury it under the complex. After all - as with every thought experiment, such as that of the US solvency when debt is now 104% of GDP, it must be taken to its absurd limit to be fully appreciated by all those who fought tooth and nail against our original proposal from a year ago to build a death star. Because the only thing better than a nearly $1 quintillion death star is two nearly $1 quintillion death stars.

and.....




http://www.businessinsider.com/tanks-hanford-nuclear-in-washington-leaking-2013-2

Now 6 Tanks Are Leaking Radioactive Waste At America's Most Contaminated Site

Michael Kelley | Feb. 22, 2013, 6:01 PM | 807 | 

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Wikimedia Commons The D Reactor at the Hanford site

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee says six underground tanks at the Hanford Nuclear reservation are leaking, the Associated Press reports.

The problem, which Inslee called "disturbing," has been brewing for a while.

Last week NPR reported that a single tank at the site — the most contaminated nuclear waste site in the U.S. — was leaking, and Inslee released a statement saying a single-shell tank was slowly losing between 150 and 300 gallons of highly radioactive sludge each year.

There are 177 tanks holding nuclear waste at the Hanford site, 149 of which are single shelled. All have outlived their 20-year life expectancy.

The site, part of the top-secret Manhattan Project, was built to prepare plutonium for atomic bombs in the 1940s. The tanks hold millions of gallons of radioactive stew.

Federal officials spend $2 billion a year — one-third of its national budget for nuclear cleanup — on Hanford, which is dangerously close to the Columbia River.  

Adding to the problem, the impending sequester will force layoffs at Hanford and could even stop work there.

Inslee termed the combination of the leak and the budget cuts the "perfect radioactive storm," according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

A question asked last week by Northwest News Network reporter Anna King — Where will officials put the toxic waste? — becomes even more relevant now.

and........



http://www.hanfordwatch.org/



Study Slams Nuclear Waste Practices at Hanford
New York Times, Feb. 5, 2013
By DYLAN WALSH



Management and disposal of radioactive waste at the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington State, marred by problems for more than two decades, is the focus of a harsh new assessment by the Government Accountability Office.

“By just about any definition,” the auditing agency says, “Hanford has not been a well-planned, well-managed or well-executed major capital construction project.”

Hanford opened in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project and operated almost continuously through 1987 as the country’s largest manufacturer of weapons-grade plutonium. Left behind at the 586-square-mile site are 56 million gallons of highly radioactive waste in aged and corroded underground storage tanks.

In 1989, the Department of Energy assumed responsibility for safely disposing of this waste, which threatens to leak into the bordering Columbia River and affect downstream industry, habitat and human health.

After attempting and abandoning three cleanup plans, the Energy Department in 2000 awarded a management contract to Bechtel National. The core of the project is a waste treatment and immobilization plant consisting of three buildings: a single pretreatment facility to sort high-radioactivity waste from the low-radioactivity kind and separate vitrification plants for each stream in which the waste will be combined with molten glass and then cooled for stable storage.

Plant operations under Bechtel were initially scheduled to begin by 2011 with total projected costs of $4.3 billion. The budget has since swollen to an estimated $13.4 billion, and the plant’s opening has been delayed until 2019. Many see this revised timeline as hopelessly, even recklessly, optimistic.

Such delays, escalating costs and daunting technical challenges “raise troubling questions as to whether this project can be constructed and operated successfully,” the audit warns. It presents a long list of concerns about the operation, from a negligent safety culture onsite to ineffective monetary incentives for progress.

The Government Accountability Office recommended a halt to construction on the core facility until the design meets nuclear industry guidelines, a new incentive structure to avoid premature reward payments, and an investigation into potentially erroneous payments.

Reports on Hanford from the G.A.O. in 2006 and 2009 expressed many of the same concerns, a pattern that raised red flags for those involved in the audit.

Of particular concern has been the use of a “design-build” protocol, in which construction is carried out as the design unfolds. Whereas standard nuclear guidelines call for designs to be at least 90 percent complete before breaking ground, Hanford’s construction is 55 percent complete with only 80 percent of the facility designed.
This approach has “led to significant cost increases and schedule delays” while also threatening the plant’s ability to operate safely once completed, the report said.

Some officials involved in the project cast its unparalleled complexity rather than mismanagement as the source of the setbacks. In his resignation letter last week, the Secretary of Energy, Stephen Chu, described Hanford as “the most complex and largest nuclear project in history.”

One problem identified in the latest audit is that over 40 years of plutonium production involving many different processes, little priority was given to keeping a detailed waste inventory. As a result, engineers now face a severe dearth of information about the waste contained in each of the 177 underground tanks – knowledge essential to separation of the waste streams.

Nor is sampling the waste a straightforward operation. Most tanks contains many waste products that tend to separate as oil and water do, meaning that a sample from one part of a tank indicates little about its overall contents. What is more, the pretreatment plant requires “black cell” technologies, so called because once the plant is put into operation the high levels of radioactivity will preclude maintenance from taking place. These must operate continuously and flawlessly for up to 40 years. Similar technologies are being installed at the Sellafield nuclear cleanup site in England, which was the subject of a similarly critical report published on Monday by the British Parliament. Sellafield has so far cost the British government $106 billion, with “no indication of when that cost will stop rising,” according to Margaret Hodge, the chairwoman of the Committee of Public Accounts. Yet another complication for Hanford is the shelving of the Energy Department’s plan for a geological waste repository at Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert, where the highly radioactive waste was to have been stored. This waste must therefore remain onsite. In light of these challenges, Dr. Chu assembled a team of eight preeminent nuclear advisers on the issue. He wrote in his resignation letter that their technical assistance over the past six months could “avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in additional costs over the coming decades.” But that view is not widely shared. Gary Brunson, the Energy Department’s director of engineering for the treatment plant until his own resignation last month, recommended in a memo memo to Dr. Chu in December that construction should “be stopped to avoid further nuclear safety compromises and substantial rework.” In an earlier memo, Mr. Brunson cited 34 actions and technical issues to argue that Bechtel “is not competent” to follow through as the design authority at Hanford. After reviewing a draft of the report, the Department of Energy supported many of its conclusions and provided a four-page letter detailing work either planned or under way that addresses many of the outstanding challenges. Just last month, after a brief hiatus, construction resumed.