Today we drove to go check out the Hanford Nuclear Site to learn about the progress and clean up. Erica Holmes, from the department of ecology, gave a presentation with an overview of the site and what they are working on to clean it up. Hanford is home to the worlds first plutonium-production facilities built during WWII as part of the Manhattan Project. The site is 586 square miles and contains 50 miles of the Columbia River, which is a major environmental issue. In general, the Department of Energy was not very concerned about byproducts when the site was built and production was underway for WWII. Ironically, the Columbia River is part of the reason why this site was chosen in the first place. They needed an area with an available water source for production and to cool the reactors. The site was also chosen based on the rocks available to make concrete, and an abundant area for the site, and the low population in the area. People were given 30 days to leave under the War Powers Act, which I found very interesting. (Click here to visit my page about the history of Hanford.)
The Department of Ecology's role at Hanford is to ensure that the clean up protects the Columbia River by following state laws to protect the air, land, and water. Their goal is also to protect and preserve the environment. Erica explained some of the cleanup challenges they are faced with at Hanford. First of all, there were no environmental requirements when the site was built. As a result, 450 million gallons of waste was dumped onto the ground, and there is 56 million gallons of waste in 177 underground storage tanks. The activities on the site lead to about 72 million square miles of groundwater being contaminated. There are also political challenges, such as the federal budget of $112 billion for the life of the site. This raises questions like, "What is the risk reduction per dollar spent?", "Why is it taking so long?" and "How does Hanford rank versus other priorities?"
So far they've stopped liquid discharges into the soil, removed 14 million tons of soil, and removed pumpable liquids from 149 single shell tanks. They are planning on having the groundwater cleaned up by 2024 and they are recording soil and water samples to better define the problem so that we can have a plan. There are about 1000 wells sampled per year and biota are also sampled routinely. The main priority is cleaning up the groundwater and soil to protect the river. They also want to finish the plant demolition. The primary remediation technology they are using is vitrification, which entails heating the waste and turning it into glass. This is one of the safeest way to store hazardous waste. Unfortunately, they are not capturing energy through the vitrification process, though. That was a little bit disappointing to hear. The overall theme of the cleanup is to exhume waste and consolidate it into engineered storage that is safe for long-term. This is the best that we can do.
I thought that the presentation gave a bit of a limited view of the Hanford site. I wish they went into the details of what is going on there with the clean up. I was excited to learn more about the remediation technologies used. I did learn a lot about the challenges they faced, including policy and technological issues. I thought it was really interesting that they said another challenge is that they don't have enough skilled engineers and we need more classes to teach people these skills. I was shocked about the number of chemicals (1800) and unknown chemicals (20) that are in the soil. I was surprised to learn that the workers are more scared about these chemicals than radioactive waste. That put things into perspective for me a little more.
After the Hanford site, we stopped to check out the Wildhorse Windfarm. This facility is located near Ellensburg, Washington and is about 10,000 acres. It has 149 turbines that generate 273 MW of electricity. It was built in 2006 and expanded in 2009. Wildhorse is also home to one of the Pacific Northwest's largest solar-power arrays. The facility benefits the local community by providing affordable alternative energy as well as creating jobs and local tax revenue.
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