March 17, 2014

HUIZENGA: ‘TOO EARLY TO SAY’ IF ADDITIONAL HANFORD TANKS ARE LEAKING

By ExchangeMonitor

In the wake of the announcement late last week that six of Hanford’s underground single-shell waste tanks appear to be experiencing active leaks, Department of Energy cleanup chief David Huizenga said yesterday that “it’s too early to say” whether or not additional tanks may also be in a similar situation. “’We’re doing a comprehensive review of the data right now. We’re confident we’ve got this narrowed down to the number of tanks that we should be looking at. It’s too early to say whether the data will reveal that there might be some additional tanks” that are leaking,” Huizenga said on the sidelines of this year’s Waste Management Symposia. According to DOE, a total of 20 of Hanford’s tanks are being examined for signs of potential leaks.

On Feb. 22, Washington state Governor Jay Inslee (D) announced following a meeting with Secretary of Energy Steven Chu that six of Hanford’s waste tanks are leaking. The announcement came just a week after DOE announced that one of Hanford’s single-shell tanks appeared to have a likely leak. DOE has said the leaks had been previously missed because of how tank waste data has been evaluated. “Within the error bars of our instrumentation, the numbers looked somewhat from one quarter to another like the levels had been staying constant,” Huizenga said in remarks at the WM conference yesterday. “We were watching this on a periodic basis, but as it turns out, we weren’t really stepping back and looking at it over a long period of time. The levels were going down ever so slightly, but they were going down slightly and staying within the error bars of our individual measurements. But when you take the actual data and look at it over a period of years, you can see a slight downward trend.”

Huizenga added, “We have to continue to challenge ourselves to think about a number of different ways to look at the data. The Secretary said the other day that if you look outside today, you’ll see the weather, but if you actually want to understand climate change, you have to look at it over a much longer period of time. We needed to take a longer picture view of the data we were gathering.” On the sidelines of the meeting, Huizenga reiterated that the discovered leaks do not pose an imminent risk to public health. “It’s important to recognize that these are slow leaks into the vadose zones and they’re still hundreds of feet from the groundwater and the rate of movement is very slow. So there’s no imminent danger. We’re not noticing any increased contamination in the extraction wells,” he said.

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