[ RadSafe ] Next: Activists against farming?

[Earley, Jack N]

This excerpt is from a local newspaper account of testing to immobilize
Hanford uranium using phosphate injection:

About a third of a square mile of ground water is contaminated with
uranium beneath Hanford's 300 Area just north of Richland. Uranium was
made into fuel there for Hanford's plutonium production reactors during
World War II and the Cold War, with water contaminated with uranium in
the machining production process disposed of in ponds and trenches.

"The high volume discharge drove it deep into the ground water," said
Mike Thompson, ground water geologist for the Department of Energy. A
decade ago DOE thought the contamination would naturally attenuate to
the drinking water standard if left alone. But that has not happened, as
the river periodically rises and more uranium deep in the soil is washed
into the ground water.

The size and shape of the uranium plume remains much the same as it was
10 years ago, and contamination levels are one to three times the
drinking water standard. However, the contaminated ground water that
enters the river is quickly diluted and the uranium can no longer be
measured as soon as the water gets ankle deep. In fact, larger
quantities of uranium appear to be entering the water from fertilizer in
farm runoff across the Columbia River from the Hanford nuclear
reservation, according to DOE.

 
Jack Earley
Health Physicist
509.372.9532