On May 9, 2017, an accident occurred in one of the oldest nuclear industrial complexes in America - the Hanford Center. Under the central site - PUREX (the abbreviation stands for Plutonium Uranium Extraction) - a railway tunnel collapsed, where radioactive waste was stored in special wagons.
The walls of the PUREX complex, which was commissioned back in 1956 and managed to work out a record 70 thousand tons of uranium rods in its history, consist of special super-strong reinforced concrete. They are approximately 6 feet (183 cm) thick. Such walls are able to withstand an earthquake of 8-9 points and not break from a shock wave if a 200 kiloton warhead falls nearby.
Can you imagine the power of the explosion that brought down the structure of a strategic facility that was built for centuries?.. The scale of the accident is also evidenced by the fact that soon an air corridor was closed within a radius of 5 miles over a potentially (or really) dangerous territory. Citizens living near the site were advised to close windows, doors and ventilation systems, and, if possible, refrain from eating.
At the site of the collapse - the junction of the two tunnels - the soil subsided to a depth of 2-4 feet (60-120 cm). The first, built in 1956, is 360 feet (110 meters) long. The second, younger, manufactured in 1964, was 1,680 feet (512 meters) long. Both contained radioactive material. The short tunnel was filled and sealed almost immediately after construction. Long was mothballed since 1967, but almost 30 years later, 21 more wagons of hazardous substances were added there for storage.
I was surprised by the reaction of officials. The leading media in the United States, for which the ecological situation in other countries is one of the priority topics (I remembered the February scandal around the iodine isotope found in the atmosphere in the Novaya Zemlya region, and how quickly the Pentagon experts blamed Russia for everything), shared the news extremely reluctantly - obviously waiting for directions from above.
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The accident was presented as a "technical breakdown". But why - in order not to allow panic or fall face down in front of the world community, to preserve the reputation of a strong and impeccable state in all respects? With much more enthusiasm, they started talking about the dismissal of the FBI director, as if this, and not the danger of radioactive contamination of a huge territory, was a matter of life and death.
According to the journalists of the Superstation95 website (for those who think that the news was inflated by the Russians and is alaverdi for February, I emphasize that the site is American), the authorities could hide the true state of affairs. Perhaps just over 60 people were not evacuated. The unfortunate people fell into a death trap, cut off from the whole world … The rest - 3 thousand employees - were gathered in one place, "East Zone 200", in order to prevent information leakage.
In connection with the above facts, rumors about the Hanford nuclear disaster, similar to the Kyshtym nuclear disaster, have spread on conspiracy sites in the American sector of the Internet, which has become a textbook example. The Kyshtym disaster happened in September 1957. The cooling system failed, as a result of which there was an explosion in a reservoir with a volume of 300 cubic meters. The tank, like the cars from the PUREX complex, contained radioactive waste.
In TNT equivalent, the force of the Kyshtym explosion exceeded 70 tons. Like a weightless cardboard box, a meter-thick concrete ceiling, which weighed 160 tons, was thrown aside. 20 million curies of radioactive substances escaped into the atmosphere and formed deadly clouds at an altitude of 1-2 km. 217 settlements were within the radius of the pollution zone.
A huge territory covering three regions - Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk and Tyumen. Hundreds of thousands of military and civilians received a dose of radiation, eliminating the consequences of the accident. For a long time they tried to hide the scale of the tragic incident: when the flickering radioactive dust appeared in the air, the civilian population was told that it was the northern lights.
Conclusion: in the 50-60s, the cooling system left much to be desired. And the tunnels mothballed near Hanford in 1967, into which no one had looked for 50 years, were no less dangerous than the storage facilities of the Mayak chemical plant in Kyshtym. Whether this is true or not, we will find out over time. But the silence of nuclear accidents is a sad global trend that kills people.
Elena Muravyova for neveroyatno.info