(MintPress) – More than 1 million gallons of radioactive liquid, approximately 1,000 gallons per year, are leaking into the soil around the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington, threatening human health and the environment.
Department of Energy investigators announced this week that previous estimates on the extent of nuclear waste leakage were far lower than expected at Hanford. There are now approximately 1,000 gallons of nuclear waste leaking into the ground from six tanks each year, a problem that would take over $100 billion to fully clean up by the end of the century. It was previously thought that just 300 gallons were leaking from three tanks each year.
The Hanford Nuclear Reservation was established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project. After the end of the Cold War, the facility almost was completely decommissioned, but still holds two-thirds of the radioactive waste from previous nuclear arms projects in 177 tanks.
Little was known about the reservation or the extent of waste leakage until 1986 when public pressure forced the U.S. Department of Energy to release 19,000 pages of Hanford historical documents that had been previously hidden from the public.
The documents revealed there had been huge releases of radioactive materials into the environment that contaminated the Columbia River and more than 75,000 square miles of land in the state of Washington.
Michio Kaku, a physics professor at the City University of New York, commented on the extent of the problem saying, “To get this into perspective, to get your head around this, imagine 80 Olympic-sized swimming pools containing the most toxic substance known to science of which two Olympic-size swimming pools have leaked right into the ground and eventually into the water table and, perhaps, even into people’s drinking water.”
In addition to being a highly-toxic material, nuclear waste has an exceedingly-long half life. A half life is the time it takes a toxic material to break down and eventually become a non-lethal substance. Depending upon the waste in question, it can take between 10,000 and 1 million years for nuclear waste to fully break down.
Washington Governor Jay Inslee believes that the $85 billion in sequestration spending cuts that could go into effect on March 1 would make it more difficult for the government to clean up the waste in the future. According to Inslee, the Department of Energy estimates that it would take $114.8 billion to clean up the waste “before the end of this century.”
The United States continues to produce large quantities of nuclear waste. According to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, there were 104 nuclear reactors operating at 65 nuclear power plants in 2011. These provide approximately 20 percent of power used in the United States.