Wow. I got my first comment! Thanks for the encouragement, Heart of America Northwest, oh ye of the Hanford cleanup!
My understanding is that after reprocessing (making the pure Pu that was used to bomb Japanese civilians in Nagasaki), the workers at Hanford just threw all the random leftover radioactive stuff together in a series of (now leaky) metal drums. This makes for some fabulously weird chemistry. Technetium (Tc), for instance, typically forms the pertechnetate ion (TcO4-), meaning it has an oxidation state (implied charge) of +7. (It can also form +4 compounds like TcO2 in more reduced environments.) In Hanford tanks, it has been found in the +1 state complexed by carbonyl ions. So weird.
Weird and gross. The site has been described as “the most contaminated of the nation's nuclear weapons plants” by the NY Times and “the nation's most contaminated nuclear site” by the Associated Press.
I was a little surprised then to read the following in the LA Times:
“The [Nevada] test site receives about $65 million a year from the [Department of Energy’s] $5.5-billion annual nuclear cleanup budget. By contrast, about $1.8 billion a year is spent on the Hanford plutonium production site in Washington state, even though soil and water contamination there is one-thousandth as severe as in Nevada.” One-thousandth! Where are these numbers from? Can Hanford still be the winner on non-soil and non-water contamination? What exactly is contaminated then?
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I was surprised to read that, too, as I've always heard that Hanford is the most contaminated site in the Western Hemisphere!
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