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RE: Hanford tanks



Bernard Cohen wrote:

-----Original Message-----

From: BERNARD L COHEN [mailto:blc+@PITT.EDU]

Sent: Friday, February 28, 2003 10:52 AM

To: Jim Hardeman

Cc: radsafe@list.vanderbilt.edu; tom.mohaupt@WRIGHT.EDU

Subject: Re: Dirty bombs



    <snip>



	I know that the original Hanford tanks were not stainless steel,

but when leaks occurred, I believe they used stainless steel either there

or at West Valley for later tanks.



     <snip>



=================



I am writing mostly from memory, so the following may be only approximate.



The original single shell tanks at Hanford are carbon steel.  Some of them leaked on the order of a total of a million gallons of high level waste, most of which is immobilized in the 300' or so of sand, volcanic ash, and sediment between the tanks and the water table.  The 28 double shell tanks are also, I believe, carbon steel.  None of them is known to have leaked any waste. 



Almost all of the radionuclides that have reached the groundwater and are moving toward the Columbia River derive from the many billions of gallons of low-level waste that was pumped into "cribs" (Hanford speak for "dumped in a hole in the ground").  Some radionuclides in the groundwater are above EPA drinking water standards.  It would be a bad idea to drink water from a well anywhere on the Hanford Site.



You can get a reasonable back of the envelope estimate of how much the groundwater entering the Columbia River from the Hanford Site is diluted by the flow of the river.  Estimate the average rainfall over the Hanford Plateau catchment (on the order of 6-10" per year over perhaps 500 square miles, estimate evapotranspiration rates (somewhere around 95%), assume long-term equilibrium which implies that rainfall recharge equals groundwater flow to Columbia, and compare that with average flow in the Columbia (5000-10000 cubic meters per second).  Using a flow of 5000 m^3/sec, I get a dilution of roughly 10,000 as the groundwater enters the river.  More than coincidentally, all radionuclides are well below EPA upper limits at the Richland pump house just below the entire Hanford Reach of the Columbia.



Best regards.



Jim Dukelow

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Richland, WA

jim.dukelow@pnl.gov



These comments are mine and have not been reviewed and/or approved by my management or by the U.S. Department of Energy.

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