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letsdothis3 ago

2017 article: Digging Into The History Of Hanford's Radioactive Waste Tunnels

One week ago workers found a tunnel filled with radioactive waste caved in at the Hanford nuclear site in southeast Washington. State officials and tribes are calling for quick cleanup action...

Historian Michele Gerber wrote a 64-page report on the history of the PUREX plant 24 years ago. PUREX is short for the Plutonium Uranium Extraction Plant. And now, its tunnels are infamous since the cave-in was discovered. The plant was built from 1953 to 1955 and opened “hot” in January 1956. “It was President Eisenhower’s most important project,” Gerber said. “When he was elected he called it Project X. And this project was literally number one in his priorities was to increase nuclear weapons production for a program that he called ‘Massive Retaliation.’”

..The PUREX plant is longer than three football fields. It stands 64 feet above the ground, and goes another 40 feet below ground. Its job was to concentrate as much plutonium as possible from irradiated rods coming out of Hanford’s reactors. It was efficient.