Hi, do you define this as recycling? or getting your own back...... And to all the US citizens, I express my condolences about the spate of recent shootings in US Schools. Now why do we not have issues like this in Australia??
regards Doug On Wednesday 04 October 2006 1:18, Keith Addison wrote: > http://eatthestate.org/ > Eat the State! (September 14, 2006) > > Glow, River, Glow: Radioactive Leaks and Plumbers at Hanford > > Jeffrey St. Clair > > The outback of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in eastern Washington > State is called the T-Farm, a rolling expanse of high desert sloping > toward the last untamed reaches of the Columbia River. The T stands > for tanks, huge single-hulled containers buried some fifty feet > beneath basalt volcanic rock and sand holding the lethal detritus of > Hanford's fifty-year run as the nation's H-bomb factory. > > Those tanks had an expected lifespan of 35 years; the radioactive > gumbo inside them has a half-life of 250,000 years. Dozens of those > tanks have now started to corrode and leak, releasing the most toxic > material on earth, plutonium- and uranium-contaminated sludge and > liquid, on an inexorable path toward the Columbia, the world's most > productive salmon fishery and the source of irrigation water for the > farms and orchards of the Inland Empire, centered on Spokane in > eastern Washington. > > Internal documents from the Department of Energy and various private > contractors working at Hanford reveal that at least one million > gallons of radioactive sludge has already leaked out of at least 67 > different tanks. Those tanks and others continue to leak, and the > leaks are getting much larger. > > One internal report shows the results from a borehole drilled into > the ground between two of Hanford's largest tanks. Using gamma > spectrometry, geologists detected a fifty-fold increase in > contamination between 1996 and 2002. The leak from those tanks, and > perhaps an underground pipeline, was described as "insignificant" a > decade ago. Six years later that radioactive dribble had swelled up > into a "continuous plume" of highly radioactive Cesium-137. > > Obviously, there's been a major radioactive breach from those tanks. > But to date the Department of Energy has refused to publicly report > the incident, even though it was reported by their own geologists. > > A few hundred yards away, a tank called TY-102, the third largest > tank at Hanford, is also leaking. Radioactive water is draining out > of this single-hulled container and a broken subsurface pipe into > what geologists call the "vadose zone," the stratum of subsurface > soil just above the water table. In an internal 1998 report, the > Grand Junction Office of the DOE detected significant contamination > 42 to 52 feet below the surface and concluded in a memo to Hanford > managers that the "high levels of gamma radiation" came from "a > subsurface source" of Cesium-137, which likely resulted from leakage > from tank TY-102. > > This alarming report was swiftly buried by Hanford officials. So too > was the evidence of leakage at tanks TY-103 and TY-106. Instead, the > DOE publicly declared that portion of the tank farm to be > "controlled, clean, and stable." > > No surprises here. The long-standing strategy of the DOE has been to > conceal any evidence of radioactive leaking at Hanford, a policy that > was excoriated in a 1980 internal review by the department's > Inspector General, which concluded that "Hanford's existing waste > management policies and practices have themselves sufficed to keep > publicity about possible tank leaks to a minimum." > > Needless to say, the Reagan years didn't augur a new forthrightness > from the people who run Hanford. Seven years and several > congressional hearings after the Inspector General's report was > released, bureaucratic cover-up and public denial were still the > DOE's operational reflex to any disturbing data bubbling up out of > Hanford's boreholes. By 1987, Hanford officials had learned an > important lesson in the art of concealment. The easiest way to avoid > bad press and public hostility was simply to stop monitoring sites > that seemed most likely to produce unpleasant information. > > It is now clear that the tanks began leaking as early as 1956, only a > few years after the Atomic Energy Commission began pumping the > poisonous sludge into the giant subterranean containers. It is also > clear that the federal government covered up evidence of those leaks > since the moment it learned of them. > > How many tanks are leaking? How far has the contamination spread? The > DOE isn't talking. It isn't even looking for answers. But geologists > estimated that the faster-migrating contaminants, such as uranium, > will move from the groundwater beneath Hanford's central plateau to > the Columbia in something around 25 years. That means that the first > traces of radiated water could have started seeping into the Columbia > in 2001. > > This reckless strategy persists. In a document called "Official > Characterization Plan of Hanford" - essentially a kind of 3-D map of > contamination at the site - the DOE chose not to include Cobalt-60, a > highly radioactive material that is present at deep levels across the > tank farm. In addition, the Hanford plan fails to mention the fact > that its own surveys have shown large amounts of Cesium-137 and > Cobalt-60 forming radioactive pools in the geological stratum called > the plio-pleistocene unit, the last barrier between Hanford's soils > and the water table. > > If the DOE remains locked onto this course it will never acknowledge > or even investigate the potentially lethal flow of radioactivity > toward the great river of the West. That's because the managers of > Hanford say they will only research potential leaks if they detect a > level of contamination several times higher than that ever recorded > at Hanford - a standard clearly designed to shield them from ever > having to pursue any subsurface leak investigation or publicly admit > the existence of such leaks. > > To help Hanford's managers avoid ever discovering such embarrassing > leaks, the site plan calls for them to drill the penetrometer holes, > through which contamination is measured, only to a depth of 40 feet - > or two feet above the bottom of the tanks, so that they will avoid > picking up radioactive traces from the region of the most dangerous > contamination. > > There's a reason the Hanford managers want the public to believe that > most of the contamination at the site is limited to the surface > terrain. Theoretically, the topsoil can be scooped up and, with large > government contracts, transferred to a more secure site or zapped > into a glass-like substance through the big vitrification center now > under construction. There's no way to de-contaminate groundwater or > the Columbia River. Their only hope for containment is to contain the > issue politically by plumbing the leaks from whistleblowers. > > There's no question that the subsurface leakage is serious, extensive > and dangerous. The internal survey of Hanford by the Grand Junction > Office detected high levels of C-137 deeper than 100 feet below the > surface - and 60 feet deeper than the current plan calls for probing. > That report concluded that both C-137 and CO-60 had "reached > groundwater in this area of the tank farm." > > Consider this: C-137 is a slow-traveling contaminant. How far have > faster-moving radioactive materials, such as uranium, spread? No one > knows. No one is even looking. > > The DOE and Hanford's contractors want to close down the C Quadrant > of the tank farm and declare it cleaned up, even though more than 10 > percent of the waste at that site remains in tanks with documented > leaks. There is mounting evidence that a plume of > Tritium-contaminated sludge has recently penetrated the groundwater > there as well. > > John Brodeur is one of the nation's top environmental engineers and a > world-class geologist. In 1997, after a whistleblower at Hanford > disclosed evidence that the groundwater beneath the central plateau > had been contaminated by plumes of radioactivity, Hazel O'Leary > commissioned Brodeur to investigate how far the contamination had > spread. It proved to be a nearly impossible assignment since the DOE > and its contractors had taken extreme measures to conceal the data or > avoid collecting it entirely. > > Now, nearly ten years later, Brodeur has once again been asked to > assess the situation at one of the most contaminated sites on earth, > this time for the environmental group Heart of the Northwest. His > conclusions are disturbing. > > "There remains much that we don't know about the subsurface > contamination plumes at Hanford," says John Brodeur. "The only way to > solve this dilemma is to identify what we don't know up front and get > it out on the table for discussion. This is difficult to do in the > chilling work environment where bad data are commonplace, lies of > omission are standard practice and people lose their jobs because > they disagreed with some of the long-held institutional myths at > Hanford." > > - Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of "Been Brown So Long It Looked > Like Green to Me: The Politics of Nature" and "Grand Theft Pentagon: > Tales of Corruption and Profiteering from the War on Terror." He can > be reached at: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > _______________________________________________ > Biofuel mailing list > Biofuel@sustainablelists.org > http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org > > Biofuel at Journey to Forever: > http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html > > Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 > messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/ _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
