Science is happening as these government employees feed radioactive waste to sheep at Hanford!
For people of a certain age, each new ecological horror story that emerges from the Hanford clean-up project holds a special fascination. It reminds us of the glorious, prelapsarian days of the late Cold War, when we didn’t have to worry about global warming or Islamic terrorists because we all knew we were going to die in a nuclear apocalypse. Ah, childhood!
So it was with sweet memories of grade school and my dad forcing me to watch Red Dawn (because “this is going to be you some day”) rolling through my head, that I read this morning’s New York Times story on how the feds are searching out radioactive rabbit droppings by helicopter.
Anything that hops, burrows, buzzes, crawls or grazes near a nuclear weapons plant may be capable of setting off a Geiger counter. And at the Hanford nuclear reservation, one of the dirtiest of them all, its droppings alone might be enough to trigger alarms.
A government contractor at Hanford, in south-central Washington State, just spent a week mapping radioactive rabbit feces with detectors mounted on a helicopter flying 50 feet over the desert scrub. An onboard computer used GPS technology to record each location so workers could return later to scoop up the droppings for disposal as low-level radioactive waste.
Frankly, I’m just impressed anything can live there at all. Mother Nature is truly impressive. Oh, and do I need to point out this was paid for with $300,000 in stimulus money? Apparently locating radioactive critters wasn’t important enough to include in the main operating budget.
If you share my fascination with this disgusting hell-on-Earth that science has created for us, don’t forget that Hanford is now the most sought-after tourist destination east of the Cascades! Last year, the Department of Energy opened a limited number of public tours that booked within hours. There’s no set date yet for when registration for 2010 tours opens, but you can check at this link. It’s Super Fund for the whole family!
And one final note: Why the hell are they remaking Red Dawn?
How could anyone have imagined that spilling radioactive waste across the state would have bad consequences?
When I read this story in the NYT this morning, I was so proud of our state – #1 in radioactive rabbit droppings! But it makes me wonder how we stack up in radioactive squirrel droppings. They’re suspiciously silent on that one.
This morning I spent a while searching for articles on Hanford because I remember a couple years ago they found two train cars full of radioactive animal carcasses and radioactive defecate that had just been buried. Anyway, in the process I found this article in the New York Times, from Sept. 17, 1950<. The sad thing is, the really did know back then, and it was public information, and they did it anyway.
I hope you caught my sarcasm there, JMB!
Interesting nugget in the quoted 1950 article – 20 lbs of U-235 is about the size of a baseball!
I remember being in the Tri-cities for a technical conference in the mid-80s. We had a guy who was a major player in the cleanup speak to this all-engineer group. He spoke of a buried radioactive locomotive, and pools of radioactive waste that had been filled in. The records were bad, and they thought the pools ran North-South, but tests showed they were East-West.
What a sorry legacy to leave to the next 100 generations.
Oh, don’t worry, I caught the sarcasm! No, I just thought it was interesting finding that 59-year-old article so I thought I’d share. Otherwise, we’re on the same page–a sorry legacy, indeed!
So yes nuclear waste is bad.
What we did at Hanford during the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s (and probably 80s) was bad.
And the clearup really could be going better.
But I think that people really have a warped sence of what this area looks like. There isn’t green ooze bubbling out of the ground. There aren’t mutant rabbits (or turtles) creating giant death mounds of radioactive poo. It is one of the most beautiful places in the state; with an incredible amount of healthy biodeversity.
Oh, I totally agree that the area is beautiful to look at, and really want to get to go on a tour. With that said, there are, in fact, mounds of apparently dangerous rabbit droppings, or at least of enough concern to warrant clean-up.