On Sunday, we brought you “Huge Fukushima Cover-Up Exposed, Government Scientists In Meltdown [7],” in which we highlighted a piece from Sean Adl-Tabatabai who asks whether government-funded researchers are intentionally downplaying rising levels of radiation in the Pacific Ocean stemming from the 2011 meltdown in Japan.
“In March 2011, Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant suffered multiple meltdowns following a massive earthquake and tsunami. The exploding reactors sprayed massive amounts of radioactive material into the air, most of which settled into the Pacific Ocean,” Adl-Tabatabai writes, adding that “a study presented at the conference of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco on Dec. 14, shows that radiation levels from Alaska to California have increased since samples were last taken.”
But while Adl-Tabatabai worries that perhaps Americans are getting a sugar-coated version of story thanks to the fact that the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has received millions in government funding, he may be overestimating the public’s interest in the dangers of being exposed to nuclear waste because as AP reports [8], “thousands of people are expected next year to tour the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, home of the world's first full-sized nuclear reactor, near Richland, about 200 miles east of Seattle in south-central Washington.” Here’s more:
The nation's most polluted nuclear weapons production site is now its newest national park.
[Visitors] won't be allowed anywhere near the nation's largest collection of toxic radioactive waste.
The Manhattan Project National Historic Park, signed into existence in November, also includes sites at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Los Alamos, New Mexico. The Manhattan Project is the name for the U.S. effort to build an atomic bomb during World War II.
At Hanford, the main attractions will be B Reactor - the world's first full-sized reactor - along with the ghost towns of Hanford and White Bluffs, which were evacuated by the government to make room for the Manhattan Project.
The B Reactor was built in about one year and produced plutonium for the Trinity test blast in New Mexico and for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, that led to the surrender of the Japanese.
Starting in 1943, more than 50,000 people from across the United States arrived at the top-secret Hanford site to perform work whose purpose few knew, French said.
The 300 residents of Richland were evicted and that town became a bedroom community for the adjacent Hanford site, skyrocketing in population. Workers labored around the clock to build reactors and processing plants to make plutonium, a key ingredient in nuclear weapons.
The park will tell the story of those workers, plus the scientists who performed groundbreaking research and the residents who were displaced, said Chip Jenkins of the National Park Service, which is jointly developing the park with the Energy Department.
And a bit more color from the government's Hanford webpage [9]:
Post World War II tensions between the U.S. and Russia brought about the “Cold War” and drove continued atomic weapons production and Hanford’s plutonium production mission. Additional reactors were constructed next to the Columbia River as the two nations began to develop and stockpile nuclear weapons. In 1959, construction began on the last Hanford reactor, dubbed “N.” N Reactor was a dual-purpose facility which produced plutonium for atomic weapons as well as steam for generating electricity. It was the only dual-purpose reactor in the United States and was so advanced that President John F. Kennedy came to Hanford in September of 1963 for its dedication. Starting in the mid 60’s through 1971, the older reactors were shut down leaving only N Reactor operating on the Site. N Reactor continued its mission of producing plutonium and electricity until 1987. Since that time Hanford’s mission has been to clean up the site after decades of weapons production activities.
Here are a few images from the site:
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For anyone planning a family trip to the country's most polluted nuclear site, you can rest assured that "everything is clean and perfectly safe," Colleen French, the U.S. Department of Energy's program manager for the Hanford park says.
"Any radioactive materials are miles away."
