The Department of Energy has declared an emergency at a nuclear-contaminated site in Washington state, after soil caved in over a portion of a tunnel containing rail cars contaminated with nuclear waste.
The Energy Department, which owns the Hanford site and is responsible for its cleanup, issued a statement following the tunnel collapse and area evacuation, saying that there was "no initial indication of any worker exposure or an airborne radiological release".
A former Energy Department official Bob Alvarez said that the rail cars carry spent fuel from a reactor area long the river to the chemical processing facility, which then extracts unsafe plutonium and uranium.
There was no contamination or injuries reported at the site, but the emergency workers said they would continue to monitor the area as a crew prepared to fill the hole with clean soil, energy officials said.
Randy Bradbury, a spokesman for the Washington state Department of Ecology, said officials detected no release of radiation and no workers were injured.
The Hanford facility's 3,000 workers were ordered to shelter in place earlier in the day, but the order was lifted for non-essential employees hours later.
"This disaster was predicted and shows the federal Energy Department's utter recklessness in seeking decades of delay for Hanford cleanup", he said.
The PUREX facility - which includes the equipment in the two tunnels - was already slated to be decontaminated, demolished and buried.
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The area contains about 56 million gallons (211.98 million liters) of radioactive waste, most of it in 177 underground tanks.
- Contaminated equipment - ========================== Henderson said emergency crews on the scene were trying to determine what caused the cave-in.
The post Nuclear waste tunnel collapses at Hanford site in Washington state appeared first on PBS NewsHour. The underground collapse sunk the soil overhead by 2-to-4 feet.
"Ensuring the safety of the workers and the community is the top priority", said Inslee, a Democrat who previously represented the Hanford region in Congress.
So far, there are no reports of any release of materials into the air, and no action is required for residents of the surrounding Benton and Franklin Counties. The Hanford site is regularly updating the situation.
"Nowhere in the DOE Complex is cleanup more challenging than at the Hanford Site in southeastern Washington", the Energy Department said on its website. Its last reactor closed down in 1987 but millions of gallons of leftover waste are contained in tanks at the site.
A source said "take cover" status was expanded to the entire site at 10:35 a.m. It even produced the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, USA Today noted. The report concluded if the tunnels collapsed, from an quake or another natural cause, it could pose a risk to workers because of the highly contaminated railcars stored inside.
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