Last Tuesday morning, a tunnel at the nation’s largest nuclear cleanup site partially collapsed, leaving a 20-by-20 hole that exposed rail cars carrying some materials with dose levels so lethal they could kill a person within an hour, according to Hanford worker safety activists.
Responding to the emergency, authorities sent hundreds of cleanup workers indoors, where they were told not to eat or drink. After all, the tunnel in question connected to a plutonium uranium extraction facility, where engineers once produced radioactive materials for the atomic bomb dropped over Nagasaki. The US Department of Energy filled in the hole, announced that it didn’t find evidence of environmental contamination, and pledged to implement “longer term-measures to further reduce risks.”
