Workers have been evacuated from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation on Columbia River in Washington State. The emergency seems to have started near the PUREX facility, used for extracting plutonium from spent fuel rods. PUREX was last operated in 1988, but radioactive waste from the processing is still stored on site. The tunnel in question may itself contain items that were used when the plant was operating and which remain contaminated.
The building has been vacant for nearly twenty years, but it remains highly contaminated. Its walls are surrounded by razor wire and barbed wire fences. Several rail cars used to transport the irradiated fuel rods from the Hanford nuclear reactors to the processing canyons are temporarily buried inside a tunnel near PUREX as a result of becoming contaminated.
Those rail cars aren’t just contaminated, they are still loaded with material left over from processing. That tunnel containing the rail cars may be the focus of the current emergency.
A tunnel used to store highly radioactively contaminated waste at the defunct Purex processing plant may have collapsed.
Workers in the immediate area have been evacuated. Many other workers in central Hanford have been told to take shelter indoors as a precaution, including about 1,000 workers at the vitrification plant construction site.
Reports are not currently indicating any release of radioactivity.
Officials detected no release of radiation and no workers were injured, said Randy Bradbury, a spokesman for the Washington state Department of Ecology.
Hanford was constructed during the Manhattan Project and was the source for plutonium used in the first nuclear bomb.