What to Make of the Tunnel Collapse at a Nuclear Cleanup Site
The incident is only part of the slow-motion deterioration of one of the country's most contaminated places.
On Tuesday morning, workers at the Hanford Site, a Cold War-era plutonium-production facility turned nuclear-waste cleanup project in Washington, discovered a giant hole in the ground. A tunnel had collapsed.
Because “tunnel collapse” and “nuclear waste” are two phrases you don’t want to see in the same sentence, the news . It’s too early to give.) But the tunnel, which houses an old railway used to transport irradiated fuel rods to a uranium extraction facility, is hardly the most dangerous place at Hanford.
