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| Fig. 1: Tanks at the Hanford Site. (Source: Wikimedia Commons) |
The Hanford Site, a decommissioned nuclear production complex, hugs the Columbia River in Washington state. As a part of the Manhattan Project, the site was established in 1943 and houses the B Reactor, the first full-scale defense plutonium production site in the world. Plutonium from the site was used in the first nuclear bomb and in Fat Man, the bomb detonated over Nagasaki, Japan. [1] As the heartland of America's nuclear enterprise, Hanford has also had one of the biggest and most toxic cleanup legacies.
As the center of the US nuclear energy production, the Hanford Site has a waste dilemma that has yet to be dealt with. Most of the waste is scattered throughout 40 miles of trenches and tunnels, some of which up to 24 feet deep. [2] The Hanford Site has discharged 56 million gallons of high-level radioactive waste to 177 large tanks (depicted in Fig. 1) after extracting plutonium from spent fuels. [2] Because high-level waste is very radioactive, it requires cooling because it generates a great deal of heat from medium-lived fission products like Cs-137 which has a half-life of 30 years; cooling takes around 100 years because of medium-lived fission products long half-life. [3] At least one million gallons of high-level radioactive waste has leaked into the soil and groundwater under the tanks. [2] Most of this waste is under the tanks in the vadose zone, the part of the Earth between the land surface and the groundwater, though some of the waste has reached groundwater. The chemical waste is difficult to deal with because of its radioactivity, causticity, and toxicity.
Cleanup efforts at the Hanford Site began back in 1989 when the Washington Department of Ecology, the United States Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Energy decided to pool their resources in the Tri-Party Agreement, a legal framework for Hanford's environmental cleanup. [4] With 11,000 workers on site designated to consolidate, clean up, and mitigate waste, contaminated buildings and contaminated soil, the Hanford Site is home to the world's largest environmental cleanup, focused on three main goals: restoring the Columbia River for other uses, converting the central plateau to long-term waste treatment and storage, and preparing for the future.
The cleanup effort continues to be delayed and has run into numerous problems. Originally scheduled to be finished in thirty years, the cleanup effort was less than half completed by 2008. As of 2014, the effort is expected to cost $113.6 billion over remainder of the effort. [5] However, the continuity of this funding has been put into question with president Trump recently slashing the annual budget by approximately ten percent. In addition to funding issues, an effort to stop leaks at the source by emptying tanks and solidifying the liquids began back in 2002 but is currently 25 years behind schedule. [2] The plan would create solid blocks of waste that could be buried deep underground, but due to legal and political reasons, the operations are not set to begin again until 2036.
The United States' long and messy history with nuclear energy has resulted in lasting consequences for our environment. Poor waste management used throughout our history has led to an overwhelmingly large cleanup effort. While there has been some progress in the past thirty years, the constant delays and uncertainty in funding point to a more systemic problem in the United States waste management that continues to plague our environment.
© Alex Pham. The author warrants that the work is the author's own and that Stanford University provided no input other than typesetting and referencing guidelines. The author grants permission to copy, distribute and display this work in unaltered form, with attribution to the author, for noncommercial purposes only. All other rights, including commercial rights, are reserved to the author.
[1] M. S. Gerber, "History of Hanford Site Defense Production (Brief)," U.S. Department of Energy, HNF-5041-FP, February 2001.
[2] F. Pearce, "The 60-Year Downfall of Nuclear Power in the U.S. Has Left a Huge Mess," The Atlantic, 28 May 18.
[3] J.M. Tingey, G.H. Bryan, and J.R. Deschane, "Dangerous Waste Characteristics of Waste from Hanford Tank 241-S-109," Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, PNNL-14904, October 2004.
[4] K. Schneider, "Agreement Set For a Cleanup At Nuclear Site", New York Times, 28 Feb 89.
[5] A. Cary, "New Hanford Cleanup Price Tag is $113.6B," Tri-City Herald, 19 Feb 14.
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