Worst Hanford tank may be leaking into soil

[Generic Other]

31. Using the word "leftwing" like this is a bad thing like you are sets me off

When I went to Hanford, we screened ATOMIC CAFE. Like ten years after it was released. In a high school biology teacher's classroom. And he got threats! To try and prevent us from watching a video and having a discussion.

Tri-Cities is a scary place. So is Moses Lake where I lived as a child. I am a "downwinder" from the bad years. My father died of it. A leukemia so rare...well you know the story.

And the environmentalists have good reason not to want to become a repository as Hanford has. Imagine if they had stored all that crap in the salt mines of Louisiana where that sinkhole developed due to fracking. Our clean-up policies are lame. I am a teacher. I get slammed on a daily basis for what a shitty job I am doing educating students. Your industry has the worst record of any as far as I can see. And yes, you may have been trying to dispose of stuff others left behind, but you kept adding to the crap. With no plan! That is the true lunacy of the nuke industry. One of the operators at Hanford told me the first emergency plans included an ax for cutting a rope that held the core reactors so they would fall into the vat in case of emergency. Now I know he was kidding, but still!

And the place is an armed fortress. The only time in my life I ever saw real Star Wars storm troopers guarding the elevators to the core. That heavily armed guard reminded me of this stanza from Byron's poem "The Death of Sennicherib" when the angel of death killed the mighty Assyrian Army as they slept on the eve of battle:

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!

Stormtroopers can't protect me from what I saw at Hanford unfortunately.

edit: typos. GRRR