Nuclear Free by 2045?

2012/09/07

When Dreams Come True

In 1990, the Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa released his film Dreams toward the end of his long career. The aim of the project was to put on film some of the vivid dreams he could recall from his lifetime. The dreams depicted are joined by a common theme of man's relationship to his environment, but otherwise this is a collection of short stories. The film was made in the years immediately after the Chernobyl catastrophe when both the Japanese anti-nuclear movement and nuclear industry were expanding rapidly. Perhaps because it had a strongly anti-nuclear message in the latter part of the film, Kurosawa found it impossible to raise the funding for production. It was Steven Spielberg who helped arrange backing through Warner Brothers.

The film received mixed reviews at the time, and it is likely that no one expected the unconventional, surrealistic concept to be a blockbuster. Regardless of whether you like the film, one of its segments takes on new significance in the post-Fukushima era. The segment titled Mount Fuji in Red depicts the eruption of Mount Fuji which subsequently causes multiple meltdowns at a nearby nuclear power plant (which would be the now idled “time bomb” called the Hamaoka Nuclear Power Plant in Shizuoka prefecture.) The dream follows two men, a mother and her two children as they flee toward the sea where panicking refugees are throwing themselves into the ocean like lemmings. The dream consists of dark humor and illogic (color coded clouds of radionuclides), which might tempt the literal minded to dismiss it as nonsense, but, in case it needs to be pointed out, the artist was trying to get at an underlying truth.

Some reviewers at the time were withering in their comments:

Time Out London: Not a little reactionary, the film's main achievement is to show a once impressive director quite out of touch both with the world and with developments in cinema. Much of it is like a moron's guide to the Green manifesto, transforming serious issues into banal trivia...

Heroic Cinema: Kurosawa’s message here is as subtle as a brick: humanity is spoiling the world, with pollution, consumerism and ignorance.

Entertainment Weekly: The picture devolves into a series of obscure, finger-wagging lectures on the subjects of nuclear war, pollution, etc. Even for those seeking faint echoes of Kurosawa's greatness, Dreams, I'm afraid, is a dud.

The Washington Post: "Pontifications" might have served as a more accurate header. Or better yet, "Sermons."... There's so much uninflected, cautionary preaching, with so much sage advice being passed down, that you begin to feel as if you're watching some sort of epic after-school special.

At the time, it might have seemed over-the-top and hysterical to preach about a geological event triggering a nuclear meltdown, but now, not so much. Now that it has happened, and now that the destabilizing effects of climate change are plain to see, the visions and warnings of "scientifically illiterate" artists of the past don't seem so easy to sneer at. Tsunamis, massive earthquakes, floods and drought are real threats to the world's 400 nuclear power plants. (For another work of art worthy of mention here, go to The Talking Heads' Nothing But Flowers, which appeared about the same time as Dreams.)

A four-minute segment of Mount Fuji in Red can be seen here on Vimeo.com but it may not last. Hopefully, Warner Brothers will consider it fair use for review such as this, and beneficial promotion for an old film in their catalog. If you can't view the video, the next best thing is to see the storyboard series of photos below.

2012/09/04

Urine tests for cesium? Government says basically, "Piss off."

Eighteen months after the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, it's difficult to guess whether Japan has continued to sleepwalk toward the next earthquake and meltdown or whether it has changed course drastically.

On the one hand, business interests have pushed hard for the restart of nuclear reactors. Policy wonks in the government agree it's too expensive to import fossil fuels. Apparently, the country can fix the balance of trade and keep the economy strong only by avoiding the loss on investment already made in nuclear plants. The cost of nuclear fuel itself is cheap, and abandoning nuclear now would mean destroying thousands of jobs and walking away from the sunk costs of a massive infrastructure of nuclear power plants – structures which are still going involve the massive cost of decommissioning, whether they are stopped now or milked for a few more years of “cheap” energy. This dilemma is also a raging debate in France right now, and it should be a debate in other places like Ontario, but Canadians seem to be totally asleep on the matter of where their energy is going to come from in the future.

On the other hand, do we want to be poor or dead? This is the obvious question asked by the millions of people in Japan who are now in favor of the complete elimination of nuclear power. Get rid of this threat to our existence then work out energy policy later.

Last year, it looked like a small protest movement might fizzle out, but this year it has erupted into a powerful force. When the Oi reactor was restarted, VIPs coming to flick the switch had to fly in by helicopter because the road access was blocked by protesters. There have been large weekly protests in front of the prime minister's residence, and at one point former prime minister Naoto Kan brokered a sit-down between the protesters and the current prime minister Yoshihiko Noda. The Japanese government's disaster response has been appalling, and I don't agree with the Noda government's approach to energy policy, but one has to be amazed that such a dialog could happen. The equivalent in the Western world would be Jimmy Carter brokering talks between the Occupy Movement and President Obama, ushering the representatives from Pennsylvania Avenue to a side door of the White House. This never happens.

A few months ago, the government announced that it would consider three energy policy options, and that it would hold public hearings and survey the public for their opinions. It turned out that the message of hundreds of thousands of protesters was a pretty accurate reflection of the millions of people who couldn't attend. The result of the public consultation showed that the public was 90% in favor of the complete elimination of nuclear power. Predictably, business interests and bureaucratic fiefdoms are fighting back, and now the Noda administration has said that they want to look for other options and find out what the “silent majority thinks.” The anti-nuclear movement can't claim victory yet.

Another sign that the once-dormant Japanese public still has a pulse is in the various groups that have emerged to share data and protect health. The government has exerted strict limits on which hospitals can give screening and treatment, and insurance doesn't cover anyone who wants to get “peace of mind” checks on the radiation their children have been exposed to. When a survey of children in Fukushima showed that 36% of them had thyroid nodules, the doctor in charge of the government health survey, Dr. Shinichi Yamashita, deemed this a rate of normal occurrence. Yet it was later discovered that he was an author of a 2001 study done elsewhere that found the usual rate of abnormalities to be less than 1%. This discrepancy may be due to the fact that screenings are now done by the latest ultrasound technology that can detect very small nodules (doctors have been known to refer to technology-driven over-diagnosis as the finding of "incidentalomas"). The baseline normal occurrence in children of thyroid nodules, and the cut off size of nodules to be concerned about, are yet to be defined.

The policy seems to be that if any problems emerge in the future, from minor thyroid problems to cancer, they will be dealt with as they normally are, without any questions raised about causes and liability. Dr. Yamashita has risen above his calling as a scientist and appointed himself the government's judge, defense lawyer and treasurer. He spent a lot of time in Chernobyl and concluded that the Soviets and subsequent governments had limited success in protecting themselves from welfare cheats and dubious lawsuits claiming harm from radiation. He has vowed to protect the national purse from such abuses:

We might find small cancer, but thyroid cancer can occur at a certain frequency under normal circumstances... After the Chernobyl accident, many lawsuits happened regarding health effects, with compensatory expenses cut into the national budget. When that happens, the ultimate victims are people of the country.

Given this limited help from their government, citizens have had to take action at their own expense. Some grocery store chains announced their own commitments to food monitoring, above what the government was promising to do, and submitting themselves to third party monitoring.

Sorakuma has data on milk produced in various places. A group called Keitousagi has helped parents test their children's urine for cesium (50,000 yen per child, about US$625), and now thousands of samples have been plotted on maps and in tables that show whether the children have any symptoms of poor health. The urine test is not as accurate as a test with a whole body counter, but it gives a good estimate, and an idea of the scale of contamination in the population. In the Tokyo and Chiba area, many of the results are ND (not detected) and the rest are below 1 Bq/kg. Some in the Fukushima area are between 2 and 3 Bq/kg (It's not clear why the data is not given as Bq/L for urine - is this an estimate of the load per kg of body tissue based on what comes out of the urine?) The Chernobyl children who were treated for heavy cesium loads by Bandazhevsky were in three groups: those with less than 5 Bq/kg (in their flesh, not in their urine), those with 38.4+/-2.4 Bq/kg and those with 122+/-18.5 Bq/kg. So based on the urine testing in Japan (with no thanks at all to the government), we can say that the scale of the problem in Chernobyl was probably much worse. In this case, it was not a good thing to be a locavore. Japanese people eat food sourced from various locations, and a big portion of the nation's food supply is imported. In contrast, the Chernobyl children who suffered heavy loads of cesium ate food that was almost entirely sourced from their local area. A big staple of the diet was mushrooms, a food source that accumulates cesium at high levels.

For people in Japan, the results of the urine tests are both good and bad. It is good that they confirm that the levels are very low and that what we've been told about the food supply is accurate. If you choose your food carefully, and perhaps even if you don't, levels will be far below what caused problems in Chernobyl victims. Yet it is very bad that the Fukushima victims had to pay for this testing and organize it themselves. Even if the government feels vindicated by the low levels that came up, still people had the right to be tested and given peace of mind. Furthermore, the data would be valuable in determining how well the food monitoring was working to protect the population. And you have to wonder, when you see all the pins on the maps, whether the lab running the urine tests could have started offering a better price for the volume of tests they were doing. Finally, cesium 137 and cesium 134 are not naturally occurring substances. They shouldn't be in our bodies, so any detected level is enough to make one feel outraged.

2012/08/29

Stuck in the Middle: Fukushima to the West, Hanford to the East

What's in the dust? A haboob blows through Phoenix, Arizona

One of the few American politicians to be alarmed by the ongoing dangers posed by the Fukushima Daiichi ruins is US Democratic Senator for Oregon, Ron Wyden. He visited the site and became alarmed by the perilous state of Fukushima Reactor 4 building's spent fuel pool. The earthquake-damaged structure that holds the spent fuel could collapse in another strong earthquake, and if that happens there is a strong possibility that the fuel could catch fire and create a global disaster much bigger than Chernobyl or Fukushima. There is a sad irony in the fact that it is an Oregon senator who had to sound the alarm because his state is already threatened by the massive radiological contamination that has been left on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation near Richland, Washington. Since the 1980s, billions of dollars have been spent to clean up the site, but it is questionable how successful decontamination will be. Radioactive plumes are migrating through the soil toward the Columbia river, so there is a danger that the contamination of the river (and of downstream cities like Portland, as well as the Pacific Ocean) will be worse in the future than it has been in the past.

Back in the day at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, Richland, Washington, USA

After living in Japan in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, and after reading about the contamination of the American West during the Cold War, I'm not sure which calamity Senator Wyden should be more concerned about. It is impossible to comprehend the tremendous numbers and terminology that are used to describe radiation hazards. All the reported numbers appear to be horrifyingly large. There are millions of terabecquerels and petabecquerels reported, and other numbers multiplied by 10 with double digit exponents indicating a long series of zeros on the quantities given. These are said to be outrageously harmful, or nothing to be concerned about at all, depending on whom you talk to. It is a matter of counting the number of atoms undergoing radioactive decay, after all, and atoms exist in numbers beyond normal intuition. Even though the exponent is the key number to notice, at a certain point, the difference, for example, between 10¹⁵ and 10¹⁸ (a multiple of 1000) doesn't register for the average person. Confusion about the meaning of radiation data occurs also because of the way we describe radioactive material. It is created by man or it exists in nature. It is left in the environment, or it is released, contained, or disposed of. The earth and living things are contaminated and then possibly decontaminated. Depending on whether one is pro-nuclear or anti-nuclear, radioactive material can be disposed of or contained, or it can only be moved from one place to another, if there is any meaning at all in trying. Radionuclides vary in their duration (half-life), energy level, and the role that they play in biochemistry. Even the stable isotopes of uranium poison us chemically as heavy metal toxins. How we perceive the hazards of radiation depend on how we choose to understand and define the characteristics and terminology of radiation. There is no agreement about what the actual hazards are.

Hanford is the gray area northwest of the "A" marker.

After the Fukushima disaster, I had to make a decision whether to stay in Japan or return to Canada, and my decision to stay reflected an assessment that there were possibly no uncontaminated places to flee to. In addition, any place I might flee to could soon be impacted by climate change. A place that is relatively safe now may not be in the future. Zones contaminated by radiation exist in Central Asia, (weapons production and testing by China and the former Soviet Union), South Asia (India and Pakistan), the Arctic (Soviet Union and USA), the South Pacific (imminent collapse of the Murorua Atoll because of bomb tests by France?), Australia (British bomb tests), Sellafield in the United Kingdom and La Hague in France (both for plutonium processing), Chernobyl, Fukushima, Algeria (French weapons testing), uranium mine sites in Africa, Australia, Canada, and Kazakhstan. The places that are not radioactive have numerous other chemical hazards that one must contend with. I'm still not sure if it was the right judgment to stay in Japan, but much that I've learned in the meantime confirms my opinion that few places are safe anymore. The Fukushima disaster is just part of a nightmare that began a long time ago and will continue long into the future. The only questions now are whether we are going to stop adding to the harm already done, and whether we will take some mitigating actions, to the extent they are possible, to reduce harm to future generations. Unfortunately, much of the harm has already been done to past, present and future generations, and it can be undone only to a limited degree. One of the urgent things to do is simply to teach the history and put up the warning signs to present and future inhabitants.

This dilemma is explained well in the book The American West at Risk, by Howard Wilshire, Jane Nielson, and Richard Hazlett. Their chapter concerning radiation hazards in the American West is also published here. It's a long chapter about the contamination left at numerous sites where nuclear weapons were made and tested. It describes the hubris of government scientists who assumed without evidence that contaminants would dilute in the environment rather than accumulate in the food chain. They also erroneously expected that radionuclides would not travel underground and reach water tables. In other aspects, the weapons program became a disaster just because of bureaucratic mismanagement, and the mistaken belief that people would always do what safety manuals said they were supposed to do. In some instances, the program engaged in the deliberate sacrifice of the ecosystem and the health and lives of civilians and soldiers – crimes which were condemned later by US court decisions that finally acknowledged the harm done.

To put the problem of the American West in perspective with the well-known disasters of Fukushima and Chernobyl, and as a way to summarize the chapter in The American West at Risk, I've excerpted below sections of the chapter that contain the data for the radioactive legacy, and I hope that the figures have been arranged in such a way that they start to make the relative dangers of the hazards comprehensible. Making sense of these numbers depends on how they are embedded in the language we use to comprehend the problem. One figure is shocking because it represents an amount of hazardous material sitting “safely” in containment pools, or embedded deep in the earth over a large area as a legacy of underground tests. These places are often nearby, but not touching, a source of drinking water. For now, such places may be harmless, but for future generations, they may be a gift that keeps on giving. For some people, the fact that this material was ever created represents an unforgivable “release” of hazardous radionuclides. For others it is not a “release” but rather a “ shielded inventory,” a “containment,” a “proper disposal” or a problem that can be resolved. How frightening the numbers are depends on how one perceives the danger posed by the existence of nuclear waste in the various ways it has been left in the environment.

The American West at Risk, is, of course, not the last word on the legacy of nuclear weapons production in America. An extensive study of iodine fallout (funded by the US government Centers for Disease Control) in the Hanford area found no harmful effects in the population. It concluded, “The HTDS [Hanford Thyroid Disease Study Team] found no evidence that exposure to Iodine 131 from Hanford atmospheric emissions between 1944 and 1957 was associated with an increased cumulative incidence of thyroid cancer, benign thyroid nodules, hypothyroidism, or autoimmune thyroiditis.” However, elsewhere in the report the authors add, “Nevertheless, there was considerable uncertainty associated with the individual dose estimates. Consequences of this uncertainty are considered in more detail elsewhere.” Thyroid disease was found in the study participants at the same rate (about 13%) as it is found in the rest of the American population, and there was no dose response relationship. This leaves open the possibility that there was no control group.
According to another government-mandated study (Estimating Thyroid Doses of I-131 Received by Americans From Nevada Atmospheric Nuclear Bomb Test ), all of the American population was exposed to 150 million curies (5.55 x 10¹⁸ Bq) of Iodine 131 during the 1950s from 90 tests at the Nevada Test Site, and it made a wildly divergent guess about how many cases of thryoid cancer this caused: anywhere from 11,000 to 212,000. Furthermore, the incidence of thyroid cancer has increased greatly since the 1970s, and there is no certainty about whether this finding comes from better diagnosis or environmental causes. The amount of fallout that all Americans were exposed to would seem to cloud results of the HTDS study which assumed that the Hanford releases contributed only 1/150th of the releases from bomb tests. The control group, the entire American population, was likely to have been affected as much as people near Hanford.

The HTDS study also leaves questions as to who consumed the milk and other produce of the region. It is unlikely that it was all consumed by the local people who participated in the study. The study also omits mention of stillbirths, infant mortality, other cancers and birth defects in humans and livestock. These are described only in eyewitness testimony of persons who lived through the period in question (1944-1957) – the type of accounts that historians use to understand what happened in social upheavals (the Nazi Holocaust, for example), but which are dismissed pejoratively as “anecdotal” in scientific research.

Wilshire et al, citing a book (Atomic Harvest, by Michael D'Antonio) that related subjective experiences of Hanford fallout victims, describe the effects of the Green Run experiment this way:

Following the Green Run, a very large number of sheep died on farms in Franklin County, Washington, near the Hanford Reservation - and a large number of ewes delivered deformed or stillborn lambs. Both before and after the Green Run, families on those farms gave birth to babies with deformities and other birth defects, and later suffered from multiple health problems, including sterility. In the thinly-populated area closest to Hanford, which came to be known as the "Death Mile," more than 60 men and women began dying of heart attacks or cancers before reaching the age of 60. After more than three decades, Hanford downwinders finally learned about the Green Run and the probable cause of their hair losses, anemias, unexplained fatigue, and reproductive disasters, all common symptoms of radiation poisoning.

Another eyewitness account related by Wilshire et al documents the problems suffered by one person immediately after the Green Run experiment.

Many Hanford victims lived far from the Reservation - one is June Stark Casey. In 1949 June Stark was a student at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, 50 miles from the Hanford Reservation. That year, fatigue and chills suddenly struck her during Christmas break, followed by permanent loss of her long, natural curly hair. Throughout her life, she has suffered from severe hypothyroidism, a miscarriage and a stillbirth, multiple tumors in various organs, skin and breast cancers, and a chronic degenerative spine disorder. Not until 1986 did she discover that Green Run radiation had blanketed Walla Walla on December 2, 1949.

Such exceptional cases may be rare and escape the notice of researchers, but heavy contamination could happen to only a few people because fallout is not distributed evenly. Some unfortunate people may consume a heavily contaminated dust particle or leaf of spinach. By the methods of the HTDS study, June Stark Casey's health conditions, and the timing of their onset, were irrelevant. She would be just one of the many research subjects whose condition was assumed to be a “natural occurrence” of thyroid problems.

Some Perspective on the radiation hazards presented in The American West at Risk

Many of the cited figures in the list below are estimates. There are conflicting reports, as expert opinion and official records are not always in agreement, and estimates are constantly being debated and revised. The estimate of the Chernobyl release, for example, depends on knowing how much fuel is left in the ruins of the reactor building, but this has never been accurately measured. Where sources are not given, readers can easily confirm or find conflicting estimates given by various reliable internet sources.

Units of measure: 1 curie = 3.7 x 10¹⁰ becquerels. In recent research, becquerels (Bq) are cited more commonly than curies, so figures in curies have been converted. Other units of measure have been converted to metric. One Bq is defined as the activity of a quantity of radioactive material in which one nucleus decays per second.

Releases:

Total atmospheric release of Chernobyl: 5.2 x 10¹⁸ Bq.
Fallout from bomb testing at the Nevada Test Site, Iodine 131 only, during the 1950s: 150 million curies (5.55 x 10¹⁸ Bq). (Source: National Cancer Institute Study Estimating Thyroid Doses of I-131 Received by Americans From Nevada Atmospheric Nuclear Bomb Test ).
Worldwide releases of cesium 137 from all sources: 270 million curies (9.9 x 10¹⁸ Bq). (Source: Robert Alvarez).
Fallout of Strontium 90 from worldwide weapons testing until 1980: 16.8 million curies (6,216 x 10¹⁷Bq) (Source: UNSCEAR).
According to TEPCO's estimate of May 2012, 5.38 x 10¹⁷Bq (14.5 million curies) of iodine-131, caesium-134 and caesium-137 were released into the ocean (80%) and atmosphere (20%).
Three Mile Island releases of Iodine 131: 13 to 17 curies (4.81 x 10¹¹ Bq to 6.29 x 10¹¹ Bq).
Releases of Iodine 131 from Hanford 1944-1957: 1.1 million curies (4.07 x 10¹⁰ Bq).

For reference, the number of atoms in the human body is 7 x 10²⁷ (Source: Jefferson Lab Science Education). This is a number enormously larger than the numbers above indicating atoms undergoing nuclear decay, which suggests that fallout has been spread very thinly among millions of human bodies. However, the numbers tell us nothing about the damage that these quantities of nuclear decay may have done to living things. The exiled Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko was assassinated in Britain in 2006 with an estimated 10 micrograms of polonium 210. This was 200 times the median lethal dose of 50 nanograms that was needed to kill him. One gram could, theoretically, kill 50 million people. Not all radioactive isotopes are, by mass, this harmful, but the point is that it takes only a relatively small number of atoms to render lifeless an organism consisting of 7 x 10²⁷atoms.

Relatively contained:

At the Hanford and the Idaho (INEEL) site, there are approximately 65 million gallons (246,051,766 liters) of high-level wastes with a total radioactivity of 399 million curies (1.2543 x 10¹⁹ Bq) (Source: The American West at Risk).
Estimate of spent fuel inventory at Fukushima Daiichi: 336 million curies (1.2 x 10¹⁹ Bq) (Source: Robert Alvarez).
Radioactive wastes buried in landfills and boreholes in the American West amount to nearly 10 million curies (3.7 x 10¹⁷ Bq). (Source: The American West at Risk)
Estimate of plutonium on the earth awaiting a permanent storage solution: 200,000 – 300,000 tons (Source: the film Into Eternity).

The American West at Risk by Numbers

Both radioactive and non-radioactive but toxic materials from weapons production and testing currently contaminate buildings, soil, sediment, rock, and underground or surface water within more than 2 million acres [8,903 km², 0.08% of total national land area] administered by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in the 11 western states. Bomb tests created vast quantities of contaminated soils, rock and water that are not identified as waste and do not appear in contaminant inventories...
Nuclear science has never found a safe way to deal with long-lived radioactive wastes. DOE sites and facilities store more than 1,000,000 tons of hazardous nuclear and non-nuclear materials just from nuclear bomb production, enough to fill more than 11,000 railroad cars of a train 100 miles long...
The nation as a whole harbors at least 1.3 billion cubic feet (36,811,900m³) of radioactive wastes, emitting 1.01 billion curies (3,737 x 10¹⁹ Bq) of radioactivity [most of it shielded and contained, one would assume or hope – the authors don't make the distinction], 10 times the amount of radiation released in the Chernoybl accident...
In addition, DOE manages lands containing more than 67 billion cubic feet (1,897,228,707m³) of contaminated water, sediment, soil, and rock, and the sites of approximately 5,100 contaminated facilities...
Some 3 billion cubic feet (84,950,539m³) of radioactive uranium mill tailings - also containing toxic heavy metals - are lying about on the ground, mostly in the 11 western states...
Hazardous contamination from either bomb making or testing - or both - directly affects 44 areas in the western U.S. The largest threats lie on and under contaminated areas close to population centers, such as the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, next to the city of Richland, Washington, and surrounded by farmland on both sides of the Columbia River...
Initially operated by DuPont, the General Electric Corporation ran the 360,000 acre (1,456.86 km²) Hanford Reservation from 1946 to 1965, the period of its worst intentional and accidental radiation releases...
The radioactive pollution from Hanford's bomb fuel production is in the form of 25 billion cubic feet (707,921,159m³) of dangerously radioactive wastes - more than enough in liquid form to fill two Great Salt Lakes, and equivalent to the worst contamination at notorious Russian bomb factories...
Hanford recorded approximately 270 other unplanned releases and spills but information about them is scanty - one spill involved dumping an estimated 25,000 curies (9.25 x 10¹⁴Bq) of radioactive cesium-137 into the ground.
One 1949 Hanford program, the so-called "Green Run," purposely released radiation over parts of western Washington state, Oregon, and Idaho, irradiating farms, towns, and people - not to mention the soil and water. The Green Run's actual radioactive release is unknown, but reconstructions suggest as much as 11,000 curies (4.07 x 10¹⁴ Bq) of iodine-131 and 20,000 curies (7.4 x 10¹⁴ Bq) of xenon 133 - more than 700 times greater than the Three Mile Island accident, and 11,000 times the threshold for human radioactivity exposures at that time...
At Hanford and the Idaho (INEEL) site, approximately 65 million gallons (246,051,766 liters) of high-level wastes with a total radioactivity of 399 million curies (1.2543 x 10¹⁹ Bq) - nearly 4 times the officially-reported Chernobyl release - are still stored in tanks as liquids, part-liquid and part-solid sludge, and solids...
One hundred and seventy-seven radioactive-waste-filled underground tanks are buried at the "200 East and West sites," near the Hanford Reservation's geographic center...
Sixty-seven of the tanks have leaked, draining between 600,000 and 900,000 gallons (2,271,247 to 3,406,870 liters) of radioactive pollution into the ground - enough to fill 4 to 6 railroad tanker cars.
Adding to the accidental leaks, between 1946 and 1966 Hanford bomb makers ran out of storage room in tanks and intentionally poured more than 120 million gallons (454,249,413 liters) of liquid wastes from the tanks directly into the ground...
Dumped into ditches called "specific retention trenches," these wastes contained more than 150 million pounds (68,038,900 kilograms) of corrosive chemicals, enough to fill 75 railroad cars, along with materials having total radioactivity of more than 65,000 curies (2.405 x 10¹⁵ Bq)...
The result of all these disposal and storage failures is an estimated 370 billion gallons (1,400,602,358,600 liters) of groundwater with various radioactive and other hazardous contaminants beneath the Hanford waste site - enough to fill the Great Salt Lake nearly 5 times...
By 1983 the tritium-containing plumes had entered the Columbia River, demonstrating that groundwater actually takes a maximum of 10 or 20 years to move the 14 miles from the 200-site contamination source to the river. The time for ruthenium to migrate 14 miles is now estimated at 7 to 8 years, while the faster-traveling tritium takes only 6 to 7 years. These pollutant "travel-times" require speeds of about a half a mile to 2.5 miles per year, much faster than the "thousands of years" estimates that DOE scientists had calculated before finding tritium in the Columbia River...
Largely to save money, the Cold War's atomic bombing relocated to U.S. soil, at the 865,000-acre (3,500 km²) Nevada Test Site (NTS), adjoining World War II Nellis Air Force Base. More than 800 underground tests have turned tracts into a whole-earth version of Swiss cheese. Another source of extensive radioactive contamination - both above and below ground - comes from failed radioactive waste "disposal."
In all, radioactivity contaminates approximately 565 million cubic feet (15,999,018m³) of soil, sediment, and rock on the riverless NTS and 280,000 cubic feet (7,929m³) of groundwater.
Radioactive wastes buried in landfills and boreholes amounted to nearly 10 million curies (3.7 x 10¹⁷ Bq) by January 1996 - 4 times the minimum amount of radioactivity released in the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant melt downs.
An unknown amount of radioactive and chemical wastes also are buried at 1,800 so-called "industrial sites," including leach fields, sumps, disposal wells, leaking tanks and others. DOE expects to identify another 1,500 industrial-site disposal areas.
In addition, 828 below-ground nuclear tests blasted out subterranean cavities, which remain thoroughly permeated with radionuclides.
At least 33 early NTS nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, called "safety" or "equation of state" experiments, now seem as unbelievable as plot devices in horror films. Experimenters blew up packages of plutonium and uranium with high explosives "...to determine the size and distribution of plutonium particles which might result from fires and conventional explosive accidents involving nuclear weapons." Although the scientists could have traced plutonium dispersal patterns using a non-radioactive material with similar physical characteristics, they chose instead to dust more than 3,000 acres (12 km²) with plutonium and other dangerous contaminants, having radioactivity in excess of 40 picocuries (1.48 Bq) per gram... A level of 10 pCi/g (0.37 Bq/g) is considered a lethal dose.
Inventories of radioactivity in surface soils as of January 1, 1990, suggest a total greater than 2,000 curies (7.4 x 10¹³ Bq) within the NTS.
An estimated 110 million curies (4.07 x 10¹⁸ Bq) of radioactive contaminants, about equivalent to the minimum Chernobyl release estimate, melted into the rocks surrounding explosion cavities, both in water-saturated rock below and unsaturated rock immediately above the water table...
The other 512 underground blasts left nearly 200 million curies (7.4 x 10¹⁸ Bq) of tritium and plutonium fission products, and approximately 4,400 pounds of unfissioned plutonium, in unsaturated rock and soil...
In addition to radionuclides, the bomb tests added huge amounts of hazardous nonradioactive materials to NTS rock and soil. No comprehensive inventory is available, but a single underground test can involve more than 125,000 pounds of lead, along with a wide variety of other toxic metals, plus smaller amounts of other inorganic and organic chemicals...
At the other major atomic sites, principally Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL), Idaho; Rocky Flats Environmental Technology Site, Colorado; Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, New Mexico; and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, more than 12 million cubic feet (339,802m³) of radioactive waste lie buried in trenches or pumped into the ground.
The only comprehensive attempt to track historical records on buried transuranic waste at INEEL revised a prevailing estimate of 73,300 curies (2.701 x 10¹⁵ Bq) upward to an uncertain figure between 640,000 and 900,000 curies (2.368 x 10¹⁶ to 3.33 x 10¹⁶Bq) - in comparison, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs together produced 1 million curies (3.7 x 10¹⁶ Bq) of radiation...
Tests showed that the soil over more than a 19 square mile (49km²) area around the Rocky Flats reservation can have plutonium concentrations as much as 380 times above natural background levels...
More than 2 million people live within a 50 mile (80km) radius of the Rocky Flats site, and new towns such as Superior, Colorado, are springing up within sight of Rocky Flats. DOE's proposed cleanup standard for Rocky Flats could leave "unprecedented levels of plutonium - at the site," but would require preventing all future public access.

This astounding litany of numbers leaves us feeling numb and confused, and in the end, they don't help much with the task of interpreting phenomena and drawing conclusions. The effect of all this radiation on human populations remains unconfirmed by scientific studies, but there is no disagreement about what radiation can do to individual organisms. It is also clear that rates of cancer and many other diseases have increased since the mid-twentieth century. Since we know that chemical pollution, poor diet, lifestyle changes and radiation are all contributing and confounding factors, it makes sense to stop worrying about the numbers, to no longer expect that research will confirm what we want to know. Instead, it would be better to follow the sensible course of not making any more poison and cleaning up what exists. And, oh yeah, we have to do this while shifting the global energy system toward something that will mitigate the additional harm that is being done by climate change.

Additional note:

There are some grounds for optimism in the fact that American activists were able to push the government to react and deliver some degree of justice to the victims of nuclear weapons production and testing. The victims of Chinese weapons tests never got any from their government. The curious thing about the American case is that both the US government and activists expressed almost no concern for the fallout that landed on Canada and Mexico. Internet searches on this topic come back empty. Only this brief report from Beyond Nuclear mentions how it is strange that the American fallout maps stop at the border. Canada is only 290 kilometers from Hanford, and the American desert tapers northward into the Okanagan Valley of central British Columbia. If the US government felt an obligation to carry out research and eventually offer compensation to victims, it should have done the same for neighboring countries that were affected. The Canadian government seems to have never expressed any concern over the issue, aside from testing some caribou meat in the Arctic, and it is likely the Mexican government never did much, either.