Excerpt Number 2---
No one gave too much thought to nuke waste at the beginning of the nuclear era. In the 1950’s, small amounts were put into 55-gallon drums and buried or placed in pools of water… as an interim storage solution. Larger amounts were placed in huge storage tanks, first single-shelled and later double-shelled. The 55-gallon drums soon were replaced with steel and concrete “casks”. The Fed Government tried to mandate a few permanent geologic storage sites in Kansas and Nevada over the years, but all were eventually terminated because of tech uncertainties or local opposition, or both. The Yucca Mountain repository site in Nevada was proposed in the 1980’s, and all work on it ended in 2011. It never came to be. Incredible!
So, you might ask, where are the tons of radioactive waste being stored currently? The answer is: on whichever site they are generated. Three-fourths of all States in the USA have such sites. All of the storage is temporary until the Feds locate a permanent site and get it built and operating. We have been generating nuclear waste since 1945, and still don’t have a permanent repository for it. The high-level waste remains radioactive for thousands of years.
For
almost two decades just prior to 1975, Dow Chemical - a private
contractor -operated the Atomic Energy Commission's Rocky Flats bomb
factory in Colorado. Because of Dow's improper storage of
thousands of drums of oil contaminated with plutonium, those drums
corroded and leaked plutonium into the soil, water, and
air.
Dow also "disposed" of contaminated water by spraying it on
fields surrounding the facility...claiming that was "irrigation".
A Whistleblower by the name of James Stone brought this all to light,
and of course, he was fired or forced to resign. In 1975, a new
Government Department took over and a different contractor was
hired.
Throughout
the 1980's and culminating (in 1989) in an FBI raid on the Department
of Energy (DOE) Rocky Flats nuclear bomb manufacturing facility,
Rockwell International (the other private contractor) was illegally
disposing of hazardous waste contaminated with plutonium.
Plutonium has a half-life of 24,000 years and is considered by many
to be the most toxic substance on Earth.
The
illegal disposal resulted in plutonium contaminating not only soil,
but the air, the groundwater, and surface streams as well. Over
sixty pounds of the toxic substance were found to have accumulated in
the ductworks of just one building of the plant. The US
EPA and the Colorado Dept. of Health both were prohibited by DOE from
inspecting the key areas of the entire facility. "National
Security". Meanwhile, plutonium was contaminating the air,
soil, and streams that wound up in drinking water reservoirs.
Eventually, DOE succumbed to pressure and submitted a huge Report
detailing the hazardous waste and what was done with it. The
FBI studied all 27 volumes of the Report, and even took water samples
just offsite of Rocky Flats. That all led to the raid on the
facility...one Agency raiding another.
There's
more to the story, going into the 1990's. If interested, go
online to YouTube and do a Search for "Rocky Flats"; you'll
find several documentaries or clips. In particular, look
for PBS
Frontline's---
Rocky Flats Secrets of a Bomb Factory.
In the 1970’s, I took an Advanced Ecology class of mine on a trip to visit the Hanford Site in the State of Washington. Back then, it was a nuclear production facility covering 586 square miles. In 1943, Hanford was the world’s first plutonium production plant, and part of the A-Bomb Manhattan Project. It generated a lot of high-level nuke waste over the years. At the end of the Cold War, it was decommissioned. Today, it’s the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States. When it closed down, it left behind 53 million gallons of liquid high-level radioactive waste and 25 million cubic feet of solid nuke waste.
In 1989, Hanford became the largest environmental/Superfund cleanup site in the country. In 2011 and 2012, it was discovered that several of the large tanks were leaking nuclear waste into both groundwater and surface water. During its operating years, the site used Columbia River water to cool its reactors. All of this resulted in nuclear contamination being detected over 200 miles from Hanford.
When my class and I were there, of course, we were not aware of any of these problems. We were given the typical tourist-type tour, and were impressed with how spiffy and clean everything appeared to be. So much for appearances.
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Plutonium is believed by many scientists to be the most toxic substance on Earth.
Not only my opinion. Be Well
