Why was plutonium dust left to blow for miles across a Washington plateau?
RICHLAND, Wash. - As crews demolished a shuttered nuclear weapons plant during 2017 in central Washington, specks of plutonium were swept up in high gusts and blown miles across a desert plateau above the Columbia River.
The releases at the Department of Energy cleanup site spewed unknown amounts of plutonium dust into the environment, coated private automobiles with the toxic heavy metal and dispensed lifetime internal radioactive doses to 42 workers.
The contamination events went on for nearly 12 months, getting progressively worse before the project was halted in mid-December. Now, state health and environmental regulators, Department of Energy officials and federal safety investigators are trying to figure out what went wrong and who is responsible.
The events at the Hanford Site, near the Tri-Cities area of Richland, Pasco and Kennewick, vividly demonstrate the consequences when a radioactive cleanup project spirals out of control. The mess has dealt the Department of Energy's nuclear weapons environmental management program yet another setback, following more than a decade of engineering miscalculations across the nation.
Department of Energy officials said in a statement that workers received only a tiny
