Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 23. februar
2013 / Time Line February 23, 2013
Version 3.5
22. Februar 2013, 24. Februar 2013
02/23/2013
Cancer threat from radioactive leaks at Hanford
By John Scales Avery
On August 8, 1945, a nuclear bomb was dropped on the Japanese city
of Nagasaki. Within a radius of one mile, destruction was total.
People were vaporized so that the only shadows on concrete
pavements were left to show where they had been. Many people
outside the radius of total destruction were trapped in their
collapsed houses, and were burned alive by the fire that followed.
By the end of 1945, an estimated 80,000 men, women, young children,
babies and old people had died as a result of the bombing. As the
years passed more people continued to die from radiation sickness.
Plutonium for the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima had been made at an
enormous nuclear reactor station located at Hanford in the state of
Washington. During the Cold War, the reactors at Hanford produced
enough weapons-usable plutonium for 60,000 nuclear weapons. The
continued existence of plutonium and highly-enriched uranium-235 in
the stockpiles of nuclear weapons states hangs like a dark cloud
over the future of humanity. A full scale thermonulcear war would
be the ultimate ecological catastrophe, threatening to make the
world permanently uninhabitable.
Besides playing a large role in the tragedy of Nagasaki, the
reactor complex at Hanford has damaged the health of many thousands
of Americans. The prospects for the future are even worse. Many
millions of gallons of radioactive waste are held in Hanford's
aging storage tanks, the majority of which have exceeded their
planned lifetimes. The following quotations are taken from a
Wikipedia article on Hanford, especially the section devoted to
ecoloogical concerns:
“A huge volume of water from the Columbia River was required
to dissipate the heat produced by Hanford's nuclear reactors. From
1944 to 1971, pump systems drew cooling water from the river and,
after treating this water for use by the reactors, returned it to
the river. Before being released back into the river, the used
water was held in large tanks known as retention basins for up to
six hours. Longer-lived isotopes were not affected by this
retention, and several tetrabecquerels entered the river every day.
These releases were kept secret by the federal government.
Radiation was later measured downstream as far west as the
Washington and Oregon coasts.”
“The plutonium separation process also resulted in the
release of radioactive isotopes into the air, which were carried by
the wind throughout southeastern Washington and into parts of
Idaho, Montana, Oregon and British Colombia. Downwinders were
exposed to radionuclide's, particularly iodine-131... These
radionuclide's filtered into the food chain via contaminated fields
where dairy cows grazed; hazardous fallout was ingested by
communities who consumed the radioactive food and drank the milk.
Most of these airborne releases were a part of Hanford's routine
operations, while a few of the larger releases occurred in isolated
incidents.”
“In response to an article in the Spokane Spokesman Review in
September 1985, the Department of Energy announced its intent to
declassify environmental records and in February, 1986 released to
the public 19,000 pages of previously unavailable historical
documents about Hanford's operations. The Washington State
Department of Health collaborated with the citizen-led Hanford
Health Information Network (HHIN) to publicize data about the
health effects of Hanford's operations. HHIN reports concluded that
residents who lived downwind from Hanford or who used the Columbia
River downstream were exposed to elevated doses of radiation that
placed them at increased risk for various cancers and other
diseases.” “The most significant challenge at Hanford
is stabilizing the 53 million U.S. Gallons (204,000 m3) of
high-level radioactive waste stored in 177 underground tanks. About
a third of these tanks have leaked waste into the soil and
groundwater. As of 2008, most of the liquid waste has been
transferred to more secure double-shelled tanks; however, 2.8
million U.S. Gallons (10,600 m3) of liquid waste, together with 27
million U.S. gallons (100,000 m3) of salt cake and sludge, remains
in the single-shelled tanks.That waste was originally scheduled to
be removed by 2018. The revised deadline is 2040. Nearby aquifers
contain an estimated 270 billion U.S. Gallons (1 billion m3) of
contaminated groundwater as a result of the leaks. As of 2008, 1
million U.S. Gallons (4,000 m3) of highly radioactive waste is
traveling through the groundwater toward the Columbia River.”
The documents made public in 1986 revealed that radiation was
intentionally and secretly released by the plant and that people
living near to it acted as unknowing guinea pigs in experiments
testing radiation dangers. Thousands of people who live in the
vicinity of the Hanford Site have suffered an array of health
problems including thyroid cancers, autoimmune diseases and
reproductive disorders that they feel are the direct result of
these releases and experiments.
In thinking about the dangers posed by leakage of radioactive
waste, we should remember that many of the dangerous radioisotopes
involved have half-lives of hundreds of thousands of years. Thus,
it is not sufficient to seal them into containers that will last
for a century or even a millennium. We must find containers that
will last for a hundred thousand years or more, longer than any
human structure has ever lasted. This logic has lead Finland to
deposit its radioactive waste in a complex of underground tunnels
carved out of solid rock. But looking ahead for a hundred thousand
years involves other problems: If humans survive for that long,
what language will they speak? Certainly not the languages of
today. How can we warn them that the complex of tunnels containing
radioactive waste is a death trap? The reader is urged to see a
film exploring these problems, “Into Eternity”, by the
young Danish film-maker Michael Madsen. Here is the link:
- http://dotsub.com/view/8e40ebda-5966-4212-9b96-6abbce3c6577.
We have already gone a long way towards turning our beautiful
planet earth into a nuclear wasteland. In the future, let us be
more careful, as guardians of a precious heritage, the natural
world and the lives of all future generations.
02/23/2013
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