Hanford Nuclear Site Holding Tanks Breach First Wall

There is recent concern around leaking tanks at Hanford Nuclear Site, in Washington State.  A double walled tank is leaking through the first wall and into the annulus between the two walls.  As a former employee at Hanford commented:

This is catastrophic. This is probably the biggest event to ever happen in tank farm history. The double shell tanks were supposed to be the saviors of all saviors (to hold waste safely from people and the environment).

A current employee commented on the inherent issues with storing this waste:

The primary tanks weren’t designed to stage waste like this for so many years…There’s always the question, are the outer shells compromised?

Source: King 5 News, Washington

Also see: Hanford Workers Sickened by Toxic Vapors (May 2016)

The Hanford Nuclear Complex is on the Columbia River, in Washington State, and the site where the United States manufactured plutonium and developed other technologies related to nuclear weapons during the cold war.  It is the likely the most contaminated area of the United States with radiation.  Decades of manufacturing plutonium on the site left a legacy of waste, including 50 million gallons of high-level radioactive waste and an additional 25 million cubic feet of solid waste.

Tank leaks are nothing new to the site.  Since 1989, the site has been the focus of environmental remediation and clean-up operations.  In 2011, the Department of Energy emptied nearly 150 single-shell tanks that had been leaking into the ground and transferred this waste to the double-shelled tanks.  The fact that in 2016 one of those tanks has breached one wall shows how difficult it is to contain this waste.

The site has plagued the region and contaminated large areas of groundwater and the Columbia River basin.  When the site was operational at the height of the cold war, they used water from the river to cool the reactors.  This water was returned to the river largely untreated and it contaminated large stretches of the river basin all the way to the Oregon-Washington coasts.  For decades now, radioactive materials have been known to be leaking from the site and contaminating major regions of Washington State.