The Sludge-Busting MARS Arm Blasts Through Radioactive Waste

[ensho]

http://gizmodo.com/5857258/the-sludge+busting-mars-arm-blasts-away-radioactive-waste


In 1943, the US government needed a reliable center for processing the Manhattan Project's nuclear material. Officials chose the 568-acre Hanford site in the deserts of Washington State to house nine nuclear reactors and 143 single-walled, underground waste tanks. Fast-forward 68 years and the US government is still working at Hanford—not as a research facility, but as one of the country's most polluted Superfund sites.

The plutonium production process generated billions of gallons of liquid waste and millions of tons of solid waste. The single-walled design of the holding tanks—built from a carbon steel liner surrounded by concrete walls, sunk seven to ten feet underground, and designed to store chemical waste, the byproducts of plutonium production—are cracked and are leaking. As many as 67 of these tanks are at least suspected (and some have been confirmed) of leaching nearly a million gallons of waste into soil the soil. Thankfully, almost all of the liquid waste has already been pumped out and disposed of, leaving just the hard gunk behind.

To compound the issue, much of the material in the tanks ranges in consistency from peanut butter to soft concrete—not exactly stuff you can just suck out with a Wet/Dry Vac. And, given that it is highly, lethally radioactive, sending a cleaning crew down into the tanks to scrape it out by hand would be suicide—even if they are wearing tungsten jackets. And that's assuming you could even squeeze a worker through the small access pipe on the surface—these tanks were never designed to be emptied.

-snip-

The MARS System will also help the government realize significant cost savings for the remainder of the project. The first tank cleaned after the superfund designation, tank C-106 cost $100 million to clean. According to Kent Smith, the single-shell retrieval and closure manager for DOE contractor Washington River Protection Solutions, the next two tanks MARS cleans should be done for about $5 million apiece.
-------------------------

good grief