Feds 'consistently in denial' at Hanford
by SUSANNAH FRAME / KING 5 News
Posted on February 13, 2014 at 10:45 PM
Updated Friday, Feb 14 at 9:50 AM
Thousands of documents obtained by KING 5 reveal a lack of action and a denial of the serious nature of a spill of nuclear waste by at the Hanford nuclear facility in eastern Washington.
The records were generated by the Washington State Department of Ecology during its investigation of the spill, which occurred in February 2012 in the central region of the 586-square-mile Hanford site.
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Detailed notes from a meeting two weeks later show what the Department of Energy did not report in the phone call. The CH2M Hill workers recorded very hot Alpha readings from the liquid on the ground. One of the only things at Hanford that emits Alpha particles is Plutonium -- the dangerously radioactive metal produced at Hanford between 1944 to 1989 for U.S. nuclear weapons program.
?(Those numbers) would indicate a problem, a serious problem,? said Wade Wagner, a retired radiation specialist from Hanford whose job was to record contamination levels at the site for 22 years. ?The first thing I would do after verifying that level of Alpha contamination would be to get away from it. You don?t want that stuff in your system.?
Ecology investigated the incident and within three weeks confirmed the box was leaking and that there had been a dangerous waste spill into the environment...
