So, what happened here? What kind of spill happened? There's such little public info easily available about this it seems, but maybe I'm just bad at searching late at night.
That's almost all focusing on how to clean it up and the current state of it. Very little about why it got to the state its in. I'm asking why is it in the state its in.
> Research activities in B-Cell included test projects for waste vitrification (the transformation of a substance into glass) and grouting methods for stabilizing highly radioactive materials. A report by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in 1993 referenced a large spill of concentrated cesium and strontium into the cell. Other smaller spills also have occurred.
> a visible breach was identified in the stainless steel liner at the floor of the sump, which is believed to have occurred at some point in the past operation of the facility. Some contaminated material might have historically leaked through the breached liner and concrete floor through corrosion or by following an expansion joint or crack in the concrete floor slab.
> A report by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in 1993 referenced a large spill of concentrated cesium and strontium into the cell. Other smaller spills also have occurred.
This sounds like the report I'm actually asking for.
But like why was there all this radioactive stuff all over the floor all these years? That's my real question. What actually happened in this room? Why was there all this stuff going down a sump?
> the 324 Building operated from 1966 to 1996 and supported research on highly radioactive materials.
There are many possible research activities that take under fume hoods in chemistry labs and hot cells in radiation labs.
At Hanford scientists were interested in both charting the radioactive decay breakdowns and half lives of elements ( a huge tree of branches and possibilities ) and in weapons development - studying the properties of various clumps of matter wrt how well they absorbed particles, emmitted particles, focused particles, etc.
When (for example) milling a disc of material, there will be waste, when using beakers, they will be flushed and washed out .. all this leads to material going down a drain and into a holding sump.
Ideally the sumps are cleaned out, even when hazardous, but eventually many sumps will crack and leak material.
Several Hanford sumps leaked - as did multitudes of Hanford waste barrels.
People were pretty much learning and developing procedures on the flay in these early days of atomic fever.
Hanford housed the first plutonium reactor in the world, that created the plutonium for the first atomic bomb at Trinity and the "Fat Man" bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. It expanded to 9 nuclear reactors and 5 plutonium processing facilities during the Cold War and produced most of the plutonium for the 60,000 weapons in the US nuclear arsenal. Because of poor safety procedures and waste disposal practices the site is a $500B dollar cleanup disaster (and costs might continue to increase well beyond that).
Not Hanford, but in 1958 a radiation excursion happened at Y-12, and in that case, it was storage drums that had corroded, so the bottom came off. That's just one example of how this stuff can get in the floor.
Seems like they were doing some work in there, and some stuff spilled. They probably cleaned it up, and then discovered a crack some of the spilled stuff leaked through?
Only slightly. People working remotely through the "hot cell". Somehow the floor was broken? What's a hot cell? Why was the floor I guess flooded with this stuff? It's pretty vague on details, maybe someone who already knows a lot about what would have been happening would fill in these gaps but it seems unclear to me.
And even then the most detailed explanation in all the links given above just mention some sump that had a crack in it or something. It still doesn't actually describe what was going on one the "hot cell" that led to leaks. Someone tip over a drum of nasty stuff? They washing exposed stuff in there? Not a lot of actual details on what went on in there.
There's no "on October 2nd 1983 operator John Smith actuated the robotic arm incorrectly knocking over the canister of strontium..."
I wouldn't expect details of nuclear enrichment and refinement techniques to be published publicly, just vague bits like saying which elements they were working with.
Hanford is the result of decades of "John Smiths" doing inadequate nuclear waste disposal. The event that happened was that we were in a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union and nobody really knew or cared about the externalities of what they were doing.
