WHATS WRONG WITH STORING NUCLEAR WASTE ABOVE THE GROUND?
Although above-ground storage has the advantage of access to being monitored, it is still not without unsolved dangers. Nuclear waste is highly unstable and reactive. For exarnple, at Hanford, Washington, radioactive wastes were stored in million-gallon tanks while awaiting a permanent (?) storage site (lots of Luck!). These tanks contain plutonium wastes and organic materials. Chemicals in the tanks break down, producing hydrogen gas, increasing pressure inside the tanks. This lays the conditions for an explosion, which would spread contaminants into the atmosphere, the land and the water, not to mention the people and the animals. In 1957, similar waste storage tanks exploded at the Russian Mayak plutonium plant and contaminated hundreds of square miles in the southern Ural mountains. According to a Thursday, January 28, 1993 Washington Post article, this explosion released two million curies over a huge territory, leading to the resettlement of 10,700 people. This disaster caused th
