Washington Gov. Jay Inslee says six underground tanks at the Hanford Nuclear reservation are leaking, the Associated Press reports. The problem has been brewing for a while.
Last week NPR reported that a single tank at the site — the most contaminated nuclear waste site in the U.S. — was leaking, and Inslee released a statement saying a single shell tank was slowly losing between 150 and 300 gallons of highly radioactive sludge each year.
There are 177 tanks holding nuclear waste at the Hanford site, 149 of which are single shelled. All have outlived their 20-year life expectancy.
Hanford, part of the top-secret Manhattan Project, was built to prepare plutonium for atomic bombs in the 1940s. The tanks hold millions of gallons of a radioactive stew.
Federal officials spend $2 billion a year — one-third of its national budget for nuclear cleanup — on the site, which is dangerously close to the Columbia River.
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