High Level of Tritium Found

["Sandy Perle" <sandyfl@earthlink.net>]

Thursday February 3 10:43 PM ET 

High Level of Tritium Found  

RICHLAND, Wash. (AP) - A groundwater sample shows the presence of 
tritium at 400 times the federal drinking water standard in a 
monitoring well 3.6 miles from the Columbia River at the Hanford 
nuclear reservation.  

An internal Hanford memo, obtained by the Tri-City Herald, says it 
could take the underground plume as little as three years or as many 
as 30 years to reach the river.  

The U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory 
and the state officials will begin conducting additional tests on 
Monday at the site.  

``We're hopping on this,'' Mike Thompson, DOE's official in charge of 
groundwater monitoring, said Thursday.  

He hopes to know better in a couple of weeks the concentration of the 
tritium and how serious a threat it poses to the river.  

A tritium concentration of 20,000 picocuries of radiation in one 
liter of water is the federal drinking water limit. The reading at 
the monitoring well was 8 million picocuries.  

Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen.  

Hanford was established as part of the secret Manhattan Project to 
build an atomic bomb during World War II. Today, the mission at the 
560-square-mile site in southeast Washington state is cleaning up the 
radioactive and hazardous waste created during 40 years of plutonium 
production for the nation's nuclear arsenal.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sandy Perle					Tel:(714) 545-0100 / (800) 548-5100   				    	
Director, Technical				Extension 2306 				     	
ICN Worldwide Dosimetry Division		Fax:(714) 668-3149 	                   		    
ICN Biomedicals, Inc.				E-Mail: sandyfl@earthlink.net 				                           
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Personal Website:  http://www.geocities.com/scperle
ICN Worldwide Dosimetry Website: http://www.dosimetry.com

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