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Six underground Hanford nuclear tanks leaking near Washington

Yakima, Washington , Feb 23: Six underground tanks that hold a brew of radioactive and toxic waste at the United States' most contaminated nuclear site are leaking, Gov. Jay Inslee announced Friday. The leaks raise

India TV News Desk India TV News Desk Updated on: February 23, 2013 11:14 IST


Today, it is the country's most contaminated nuclear site, with cleanup expected to last decades and cost billions of dollars. There are legal and ethical considerations to cleaning up the Hanford site at the national level, Inslee said, adding that he will continue to insist that the Department of Energy fully clean up the site.

The tanks hold some 53 million gallons (200 million liters)of highly radioactive waste — enough to fill dozens of Olympic-size swimming pools — and many of those tanks are known to have leaked in the past. An estimated 1 million gallons of radioactive liquid already leaked.

The tanks also are long past their intended 20-year life span — raising concerns that even more tanks could be leaking — though they were believed to have been stabilized in 2005.

Inslee said the falling waste levels in the six tanks were missed on graphs because only a narrow band of those graphs was evaluated, rather than a wider band that would have shown the levels changing over time.

"It's like if you're trying to determine if climate change is happening, only looking at the data for today," he said. "Perhaps human error, the protocol did not call for it. But that's not the most important thing at the moment. The important thing now is to find and address the leakers."

The government already spends $2 billion each year on Hanford cleanup — one-third of its entire budget for nuclear cleanup nationally.

The Energy Department has said it expects funding levels to remain the same for the foreseeable future, but a new Energy Department report released this week includes annual budgets of as much as $3.5 billion during some years of the cleanup effort.

Much of that money goes toward construction of a plant to convert the underground waste into glasslike logs for safe, secure storage. The plant, last estimated at more than $12.3 billion, is billions of dollars over budget and behind schedule. It isn't expected to being operating until at least 2019.

Given those delays, the federal government will have to show that there is adequate storage for the waste in the meantime, Inslee said.
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