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Hanford was a site for production of materials for nuclear weapons, not a power plant. You're arguing against nuclear weapons, not against nuclear power.

In addition, according to the wikipedia article you cite, the B Reactor at Hanford was the first industrial-scale plutonium production reactor ever built. Do you think it is relevant to discussion of the safety of modern nuclear facilities to point out flaws in reactors that, for the most part(the N Reactor is the only one that operated later than 1971 at the site), have been decommissioned for about forty years, especially given that one of them was the first of its kind ever built on that scale? Those reactors were built forty-five to sixty-five years ago.



Hanford was reprocessing nuclear materials, what the author of the article was advocating in his article.

The horrible mess at Hanford is EXACTLY the kind of mess when you operate reprocessing reactors.


Much of the mess at Hanford resulted from storage of waste products, not from the reprocessing process itself. Much of that waste may have been able to be reprocessed again, decreasing the amount of negative effect on the surrounding area. The article seemed to me to clearly be advocating something more akin to the combination of the breeder reactor at Marcoule and the reprocessing facilities at La Hague in France(which releases less than 1% of the natural background radiation).


And you're going to tell us that there is no need to store materials that are going to be reprocessed because they will always exit initial processing in exactly the amount needed for the next reprocessing step "recipe." There will also never be a break down of equipment leading to a back-up of one or more of these waste products before they go in. France also has what US right wingers are calling "socialist" environmental regulators. Inspectors that actually inspect the systems they are supposed to regulate, and "communist" ideas like fines for corporation that try to circumvent safety rules.

There's no such thing as Mr Ekiru suggests in real world USA. Hanford is precisely the model that's appropriate for the US nuclear industry. That's what happens when the same corporations who built the Big Dig also build nuclear reactors the same way the Big Dig was built. Like crud.




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