Hanford nuclear tank in Washington State is leaking liquids

[freshwest]

3. I thought it'd been leaking for decade and par for the course.

I recall hearing about the problems at Hanford in the early seventies. I have a friend who finally succumbed from being an downwinder.

The oldest report I can find on the net is from April of 2010 before the Tea Party took over. Obama was trying to double the Super Fund as an additonal part of the stimulus program he'd begun.

Just think, the POTUS has to go begging to Congress, as if this was optional.

Hanford Nuclear Reservation: Big problems at nation's #1 dump, but stimulus funds speed cleanup

...Now, there's no doubt that Hanford is still a mess. The project is starting to look like it will cost roughly twice as much and take roughly twice as long as originally estimated, as Karen Dorn Steele established on our tour. There's been no shortage of screwups and missteps in the cleanup process. Radioactive waste is leaking into the only part of the Columbia River that still flows naturally, onto the spawning grounds for that so-very-rare commodity on the Columbia, a healthy salmon run.

And, of course, there’s the seemingly never-ending quest to build what has begun to sound like a figment of someone’s imagination: A plant that encases the worst of the wastes in a glass-like substance for longterm storage. Now it’s supposed to be done in 2019. I’ll believe it when I see it.

Plus, let’s not forget just how bad the damage was: 80 square miles of groundwater laced with the likes of strontium, tritium, uranium, hexavalent chromiumand uranium. Not to mention the non-radioactive hazardous waste. At the height of production of plutonium for nuclear bombs, Hanford was drawing 32,000 gallons of water per minute from the river, and dumping it back with basically no treatment, contaminated.

To give you an idea of how bad the problem is at Hanford today, look at the federal budget: Hanford’s normal $2 billion allocation – doubled this year by stimulus funds – dwarfs the entire Superfund budget, which President Obama is trying to raise from $605 to $1.3 billion. So, no, I’m not trying to say all is well at Hanford. Just that they are making some progress...

http://www.invw.org/node/1022

One may hope the GOP Congress might consider funding a clean-up of what has been going on for years, and the newest leak. Oops, what was I thinking?

The Tea Party wants to abolish the EPA, etc. Never mind...