The Removal of Some Radionuclides from the Nuclear Weapon Waste Tanks at Hanford w/Titanate IE.

[hunter]

3. I'm looking at the satellite images. Most of the Hanford Site is undeveloped.

The surrounding area is covered with farms.

The farms have the larger environmental footprint.

The Hanford Site would have been covered with farms too if it hadn't been chosen for the Manhattan Project, and thus it became an unintentional nature preserve.

The Hanford site encompasses 586 square miles of shrub steppe habitat that has been protected from human disturbances since the early 1940’s as part of the Manhattan project. Most of the Hanford site was a buffer for the production activities and incidentally preserved the biological diversity of the arid landscape that supports and abundance of native plant and wildlife communities. HMIS’s Ecological Monitoring team monitors the biota including State and Federally listed species to assess the abundance, vigor or condition, and distribution on the Hanford Site. The associated data is used by U.S. Department of Energy and Hanford Site contractors to support environmental cleanup and restoration activities, mitigation actions, and land use planning, and to maintain compliance with ecological resource laws.

https://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/EcologicalMonitoring