Word: savannah
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...newly aroused DOE bureaucracy struggles with the massive task of trying to clean up improperly stored radioactive wastes from 40 years of bombmaking, no solution is in sight for a demonstrably safe permanent disposal system that will last for the required millenniums. At just two facilities, Hanford and Savannah River, nearly 100 million gal. of highly radioactive wastes have been generated. At Hanford alone, some 200 billion gal. of the more benign low-level wastes have been dumped into ponds, pits and basins -- enough to create a lake 40 ft. deep and large enough to cover Manhattan...
...Savannah River layout, where discharges of reactor coolant emerge hot enough to boil a frog, a DOE official admits, "It's not too good for the fish around here either." The agency also concedes that a network of shallow aquifers under the vast acreage is contaminated with radioactive compounds. A deeper aquifer contains toxic, nonradioactive materials. The only argument: whether this supply is the source of drinking water for the surrounding area...
...Savannah River that some of the weapons industry's most disturbing blunders have been exposed. Congressional investigators have turned up internal memos from the facility's manager, E.I. du Pont de Nemours, citing numerous incidents over three decades. On May 10, 1965, operators ignored a loud alarm for 15 minutes. Then they saw water spilling across the reactor- room floor. Fully 2,100 gal. of fluid had leaked out of the reactor, leaving the level of coolant too low. The reactor shut itself down automatically...
...have occurred in U.S. reactors before the crisis at Three Mile Island. Those were in the pioneering days of nuclear weaponry. Besides the partial melting of a fuel rod in 1970, a more recent near calamity took place in March 1982, when a technician at one of the Savannah River reactors left a water valve open, and for twelve hours the undetected flow flooded a large plutonium-processing room. The contaminated water was 2 ft. deep...
William Lawless, a former engineer at Savannah River, contends that plant managers paid little attention to workers who spotted what they considered unsafe practices. He says he was overruled when he tried to warn officials in 1982 about storing highly radioactive liquid waste in holding tanks whose floors had corrosive pits. "It's just like the shuttle disaster," he says. "Engineers weren't allowed to stop something they should have. Management controls them...