2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumHillary Wants Nuclear Power: 1,000s of Gallons Radioactive Waste Leaking at Hanford, WA Reactor
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-19/catastrophic-thousands-gallons-radioactive-waste-leak-washington-nuclear-storage-sit"This Is Catastrophic" - Thousands Of Gallons Of Deadly Radioactive Waste Leak At Nuclear Storage Site
The ongoing radioactive leak problems at the Hanford Site, a nuclear storage tank in Washington State, are nothing new.
We first wrote about the ongoing radioative leakage at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, created as part of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, in 2013.
As a reminder, during the Cold War, the project was expanded to include nine nuclear reactors and five large plutonium processing complexes, which produced plutonium for most of the 60,000 weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Alas, the site has been leaking ever since, as many of the early safety procedures and waste disposal practices were inadequate and Hanford's operations released significant amounts of radioactive materials into the air and the neighboring Columbia River.
PyaarRevolution
(814 posts)NO! NO! NO! It's bad enough that Shinzo Abe is pushing for more nuke plants when god knows how much is leaking. "But it's only 10x as much usually leaks".
Over here some of those nuke plants all still have that leak issue, all across the U.S. Sounds like it's because of a fault or the build but they need to be SHUT DOWN. Let's go Green and not poison people for crying out loud.
edit: Let me be clear I don't mean they're leaking as much as Fukushima Daiichi.
Generic Other
(28,979 posts)It is worse than you can ever imagine. I scrawled this poem on the back of the pamphlet they gave me. Clearly, the "glowing" pro-nuke propaganda failed to resonate with me:
Company Town
Along this stretch of river,
silence never lifts.
Boarded up houses with for sale signs
line the edge of town,
out past the Atomic Autowreckers
tangle of rust, chrome, broken windshields,
and blackberry vines.
Downwind, nothing moves.
Not many secrets remain buried either;
the rotten past bubbles up
through floorboards,
sloughs off walls,
oozes into the river.
They say scientists once spun starglass here,
nothing left now but the ticking of geiger counters
and the certainty that someone will be taking a reading on you soon
Seems everyone in town knows
the old guy who worked at the plant forty
years, never had an accident,
smoked five packs of marlboros
every day, ate lard on toast, pissed
out gutloads of beer,
drove ten miles in his pickup to the plant
along this road every damned day,
window rolled down, dust blowing
in off the arid reach.
He was the oldest man in town
when he died. Outlived a whole lot of people.
Didn't hurt him any.
Even outlived his kid--the one with the
thyroid. No one knew what was wrong.
A long time ago before they had names
for that kind of stuff. Could
have been in the milk, they said.
Afterwards, his wife got all wore down,
bone tired long before no doubt;
she caught a bus heading west. Never came back.
His neighbor ran off too.
Thats when the first ones went on medical disability.
One of the plant managers
blamed carelessness. Company doctor wouldnt
say, but everyone else knew it was cancer.
They died in pieces, one inch at a time, in those days.
How many?
No one dares keep score in a company town
where the high school jocks wear
atomic mushroom clouds on
their lettermans jackets, and everyone
knows someone they like who works over there.
the women work elsewhere if they are
still young enough to want more babies.
In a company town like this, everyone
is strictly non-essential personnel,
sniffed and x-rayed everyday before
they get off work. They carry the weight
of spent fuel rods
like deadly suppositories. You can hear their terrified footsteps
echo as they pass through scanners, past
machine gun armed security, you can hear their shoes click
against cement as they punch a timeclock
ticking to meltdown.
Joob
(1,065 posts)But as a Washingtonian, this sucks to hear
snagglepuss
(12,704 posts)MisterP
(23,730 posts)just about the Bomb!" same as the $1 billion nuclear-powered plane ...
since the 50s they were just expecting that either they could reuse the waste or it'd lead to fusion Any Day Now and then finally be profitable
didn't happen, can't happen
http://www.plutopia.net