[CPEO-MEF] RADIATION: Hanford (WA) "rabbit droppings"

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Even Rabbit Droppings Count in Nuclear Cleanup

By MATTHEW L. WALD
New York Times
October 15, 2009

WASHINGTON - Anything that hops, burrows, buzzes, crawls or grazes near 
a nuclear weapons plant may be capable of setting off a Geiger counter. 
And at the Hanford nuclear reservation, one of the dirtiest of them all, 
its droppings alone might be enough to trigger alarms.

A government contractor at Hanford, in south-central Washington State, 
just spent a week mapping radioactive rabbit feces with detectors 
mounted on a helicopter flying 50 feet over the desert scrub. An onboard 
computer used GPS technology to record each location so workers could 
return later to scoop up the droppings for disposal as low-level 
radioactive waste.

The Hanford site, overseen by the federal Department of Energy, produced 
roughly two-thirds of the plutonium used in the nation’s nuclear weapons 
arsenal, beginning in World War II and ending in the 1980s. Today it is 
the focus of the nation’s largest environmental cleanup, an effort that 
has cost tens of billions of dollars and is expected to continue for 
decades.

....

For the entire article, see
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/15/science/earth/15rabbit.html?_r=1

--


Lenny Siegel
Executive Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org




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