CBS News) The new Secretary of Energy has been on the job only four weeks, but he made a beeline Wednesday to see his biggest headache for himself. Ernest Moniz went to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state.
[…]
“There’s something on the order of 1,000 gallons a year that are leaking now from these six tanks,” says Washington Gov. Jay Inslee.
The government’s clean-up plan involves pumping 56 million gallons of waste out of 177 tanks, mixing it with liquid glass and sealing it in canisters.
“That does involve technological challenges that some people have associated with the kind of leap that the moonshot involved,” Inslee says. “This has never been done in human history before.”
[…]
Little is known about what was put in the tanks and how it’s changed since the 1940s. Busche is worried it’s unstable and an explosion during clean-up could release radioactive material.
Read more at Nuclear waste clean-up delayed and billions over budget
