Skyla Hollowell
5th Grader in White Salmon, WA. Winner of the 2016 EnviroGorge Kids Writing Contest.
My biggest environmental concern in the Gorge is Hanford, which is a storage place in Richland, Washington that holds nuclear waste and chemicals from World War II.
There have been two big leaks on Hanford’s property. This is a major concern for the Gorge, because the chemicals can leak into the ground and get into the Columbia River and contaminate our drinking water. We need to help clean up the mess before it’s too late and it destroys the Columbia River Gorge.
The Leak!
Early one morning, leak detectors sounded loudly like a weed-eater. Hanford’s crew slowly squished a camera between the inner and outer shells of the tanks.
After looking around, the crew found 8.04 inches of radioactive, chemically toxic waste leaking and continuing to leak into the ground. Each tank at Hanford can hold up to one million gallons of the radioactive waste. We cannot let any of that leak into our water.
The news of the leak was big and the crew knew what was going to happen if they did not help try to clean it up. The chemicals were going to seep into the ground with the water and go to the Columbia River and pollute our water that we drink. This would harm all of the living things along the river.
Mike Geffre was the person who found out that the tank was failing in 2011. In 2013, the owners of the tanks ignored Geffre’s warnings that the tanks were leaking. In 2016, the first leak began. I think that if they had listened to him at the time, they could have avoided the leak. They could have pumped out the tank and it would not have taken so long to stabilize it.
There are 28 double-shell tanks in Hanford, which have held nuclear by-products for four decades (1942-1989). These tanks hold Plutonium products that were used to make bombs that were dropped on Nagasaki, Japan in World War II (1942-1945).
The workers have been cleaning for 37 years and Hanford is still not clean! Health danger for the workers is more serious than ever in Hanford. It has increased by 10 percent since 2011 when the leak started.
The tanks were prime tanks and were not made to hold this radioactive waste for so long. The outer shell might be damaged because of the long time it has been in use. The workers have not found out the problem exactly. The accumulation of waste makes it the deadliest liquid this close to the Earth’s crust.
Tank AY-102 was recently pumped out and it took over a month to clean out. This means it would take a minimum of 28 months just to pump out all of the tanks, but there really isn’t a place to put the waste because we don’t want to pollute any other place on Earth either.
