Nuclear Waste Leak in the United States

                        
           Hanford nuclear site, Washington state (Google Image)           AFP Photo

US officials said one of the most contaminated waste sites in America is leaking nuclear waste. The Hanford Nuclear Reservation stores material from the production of atomic weapons, in tanks which have outlived their 20-year lifespan.

The nuclear leak is the first confirmed case of this type since the federal government’s introduction of a security programme in 2005 to dispose of content  from exposed single-shell tanks.

The US Department of Energy announced that one of Hanford ‘s 177 radioactive waste tanks is disposing up to 300 gallons per year.  The leaks have come from Tank T-111, built between 1943 and 1944, now holding some 447,000 gallons of highly radioactive slurry left from plutonium production of  nuclear arms.

"I am alarmed about this on many levels," Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee  said at a news conference. He said it is not only about Hanford alone but also of other sites in the United States.

Other tanks on the site are now been examined and currently there is “no immediate public health risk,” the governor said.

Hanford became the site of the first full-scale plutonium reactor in the world after it was established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project in the nuclear race. Atomic material produced there was used in the Nagasaki bomb in 1945.

An estimated 1 million gallons of waste, leaked from the site over 70 years, threatens the local environment of the Columbia River.

The US Department of Energy is trying to deal with the problem by transferring the waste from 149 potentially unsafe single wall tanks to 28 double-wall units, but space is running out. More than 60 of the tanks are thought to have leaked over time.

Erection of an estimated $12 billion plant is running behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. The plant is designed to turn radioactive waste into glass logs through a vitrification process.

"We're out of time, obviously. These tanks are starting to fail now," said Tom Carpenter of the Hanford watchdog group Hanford Challenge. "We've got a problem. This is big."

According to the Seattle Times, around 10 percent of the 586-square-mile facility is contaminated.

Materials including tritium, chromium nitrate and strontium-90  have penetrated the river, according to the state Department of Ecology. But no unsafe levels have been found in farm crops in the region according to the department.