NEW YORK, June 1 (Xinhua) — From 1950 to 1990, the U.S. Energy Department produced a mean of 4 nuclear bombs every single day, turning them out of rapidly constructed factories with few environmental safeguards that left behind an unlimited legacy of poisonous radioactive waste, reported The New York Times (NYT) on Wednesday.
“Nowhere were the problems greater than at the Hanford Site in Washington State, where engineers sent to clean up the mess after the Cold War discovered 54 million gallons of highly radioactive sludge left from producing the plutonium in America’s atomic bombs, including the one dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki in 1945,” stated the report.
Engineers thought they’d solved it years in the past with an elaborate plan to pump out the sludge, embed it in glass and deposit it deep within the mountains of the Nevada desert, it famous.
“But construction of a five-story, 137,000 square-foot chemical treatment plant for the task was halted in 2012 — after an expenditure of 4 billion U.S. dollars — when it was found to be riddled with safety defects,” it stated. “The naked superstructure of the plant has stood in mothballs for 11 years, a potent symbol of the nation’s failure, nearly 80 years after the Second World War, to deal decisively with the atomic era’s deadliest legacy.”
The U.S. authorities now seems to be critically contemplating whether or not it is going to be crucial to go away hundreds of gallons of leftover waste buried eternally in Hanford’s shallow underground tanks, and defend a number of the waste not in impenetrable glass, however in a concrete grout casing that will virtually actually decay hundreds of years earlier than the poisonous supplies that it’s designed to carry at bay, it added.