Hanford Officials Hid Leak Evidence From Advisory Panel [View all]
by SUSANNAH FRAME / KING 5 News
Posted on May 21, 2013 at 10:10 PM
Updated yesterday at 7:49 AM
A government-chartered advisory panel was told last September that materials spotted outside the inner wall of a tank holding radioactive waste at the Hanford Site were possibly the result of a "carbonate buildup," “cross-contamination” or "rainwater leakage."
"We've seen a lot of things and they don't point to any one thing," a senior U.S. Department of Energy official at Hanford told the group on Sept. 7, "so that's why it's hard to speculate what it is."
But internal emails obtained by KING 5, written by the government contractor carrying the multi-billion-dollar contract to manage the tanks, show that tests conducted weeks earlier had already confirmed that
the materials found in the safety space of the double-shell tank were highly radioactive and matched the chemical makeup of waste contained in the primary tank.
On Aug. 13, results of a scientific analysis showed samples taken from the space contained high levels of two radioactive isotopes --
Strontium-90 and
Cesium-137. Smaller traces of
Plutonium-239/240 and
Americium-241 were also detected. In addition scientists analyzing the sample found traces of potassium -- a unique marker to this specific tank (found in one other double-shell tank at Hanford).
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