{"id":180365,"date":"2017-05-10T18:49:00","date_gmt":"2017-05-10T23:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/05\/10\/well-this-is-reassuring-2\/"},"modified":"2017-05-10T18:49:00","modified_gmt":"2017-05-10T23:49:00","slug":"well-this-is-reassuring-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/05\/10\/well-this-is-reassuring-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Well, This is Reassuring"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>
Pucker factor: 11<\/b><\/i><\/div>\n

At one of the myriad of radioactive waste dumps in Hanford, Washington, a tunnel has collapsed<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Hundreds of workers at the Department of Energy\u2019s Hanford nuclear site in Washington state had to \u201ctake cover<\/a>\u201d Tuesday morning after the collapse of 20-foot-long portion of a tunnel used to store contaminated radioactive materials. <\/span>

<\/span> The Energy Department said it activated its emergency operations protocol after reports of a \u201ccave-in\u201d at the 200 East Area in Hanford, a sprawling complex about 200 miles from Seattle where the government has been working to clean up radioactive materials left over from the country\u2019s nuclear weapons program. <\/span>

<\/span> The agency said in a statement<\/a> that the 20-foot section is part of a tunnel that is hundreds of feet long and is \u201cused to store contaminated materials.\u201d The tunnel is one of two that run into the Plutonium Uranium Extraction Facility, also known as PUREX. The section that collapsed was \u201cin an area where the two tunnels join together,\u201d the department said. <\/span>

<\/span> The PUREX facility, once used to extract plutonium from spent nuclear fuel, has been idle for years but remains \u201chighly contaminated,\u201d the agency said.<\/span>
\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span> An August 2015 report by Vanderbilt University\u2019s civil and environmental engineering department said the PUREX facility and the two tunnels had \u201cthe potential for significant on-site consequences\u201d and that \u201cvarious pieces of dangerous debris and equipment containing or contaminated with dangerous\/mixed waste\u201d had been placed inside the tunnels.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

Former Energy Department official Robert Alvarez said that remotely controlled rail cars once carried spent fuel from a reactor to the PUREX chemical processing facility, which then extracted dangerous plutonium. He said the plant lies near the middle of the sprawling 580-square mile Hanford site and was \u201ca very high-hazard operation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many contaminated pieces of equipment, including the rail cars, have simply been left in the tunnels, he said. The Vanderbilt report said that there were eight rail cars in the older tunnel and 28 in the newer one.<\/p>\n

The cave-in was discovered during \u201croutine surveillance,\u201d according to the Energy Department. Photographs showed a gaping hole, plainly evident because the tunnels are largely above ground.<\/p>\n

Workers near the PUREX facility were told to shelter in place, and access to the area was restricted, according to the Energy Department statement. Officials requested that the Federal Aviation Administration put a temporary flight restriction in place, according to the FAA.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We still have billions of dollars of nuclear waste to clean up from the Truman administration. <\/p>\n

Nuclear power is a suckers game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pucker factor: 11 At one of the myriad of radioactive waste dumps in Hanford, Washington, a tunnel has collapsed: Hundreds of workers at the Department of Energy\u2019s Hanford nuclear site in Washington state had to \u201ctake cover\u201d Tuesday morning after the collapse of 20-foot-long portion of a tunnel used to store contaminated radioactive materials. The …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[484,502,477],"class_list":["post-180365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-environment","tag-nuclear-power","tag-nuclear-weapons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180365"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180365"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180365\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}