![]() Hanford dumped 110 million curies into the Columbia River. A curie is how much radiation and how fast a gram of radium emits it: 37 billion emissions per second. How radioactive substances affect health and the environment was not understood back then. Little attention was paid to how it might affect river life, including salmon and other commercial and game fish. Thirty miles (50 kilometers) downstream, the water from the plant was still warm. ![]() So, it sucked huge volumes of water out of the river, passed them through its machinery, and spewed them back, heated, into the river to flow 200 miles down to the Pacific Ocean. ![]() The reactors generated great amounts of waste heat and had to be kept cool. Running the reactors required huge amounts of energy the Grand Coulee Dam 156 miles upstream provided it. Hanford sits on the west bank of the Columbia River for two reasons. We won’t discuss how horribly indigenous and other local people and workers suffered from Hanford, but I can provide an internet link. After World War II the facility was expanded to nine reactors and five reprocessing complexes. The plutonium for “Fat Man,” the 21-kiloton bomb that destroyed Nagasaki in 1945, was manufactured out of uranium at the Hanford site, 586 square miles (about 1,500 square kilometers) of inconspicuous desert in south-central Washington State. Hanford is the first and worst toxic nuclear-waste dump in the US and possibly the world (although we don’t know what Russia might be hiding). Why so many? Waste disposal is the very worst, unsolvable problem from nuclear weapons and power plants! People must understand that should the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP) be activated, its wastes will be impossible to get rid of, and will permanently harm the environment. This foray is the first of six about radioactive wastes. The following is the 30th in a series of excerpts from Kelvin Rodolfo’s ongoing book project “Tilting at the Monster of Morong: Forays Against the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant and Global Nuclear Energy.“
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