The USA Today has a big front page piece today on the difficulties facing the protracted effort to clean up the tanks and tanks of nuclear waste sitting in deteriorating tanks at the Hanford Nuclear Facility in Washington:

More than 60 of the tanks are thought to have leaked, losing a million gallons of waste into soil and groundwater. So far, the contamination remains within the boundaries of the barren, 586-square-mile site, but it poses an ongoing threat to the nearby Columbia River, a water source for communities stretching southwest to Portland, Ore.

So, no pressure to get this process going, then, right? No worries, because it’s been in process for a decade already and we know what we’re doing.

The challenge lies in the plant’s huge pre-treatment building, where the waste traverses an intricate set of pipes and vessels as its radioactive streams are separated and sent to separate facilities for conversion into glass. To keep the waste agitated, many of the pre-treatment vessels contain “pulse jet mixers” that act like giant turkey basters, sucking the waste into tubes and expelling it through jet nozzles.

“No one can stand up and say with any certainty that (the mixers) will work,” said Walter Tamosaitis, who spent seven years as a supervising engineer on the project for URS Corp. before being reassigned in 2010.

Oh, I see. And it turns out that if the system doesn’t work — the waste is so toxic that once the treatment plant is sealed off and the cleanup process started, it can never be re-opened.

This, to me, is a prime example of why nuclear power just isn’t worth it. We have options that don’t produce these kinds of problems.

Go give the article a read.