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Shea Gunther

Radioactive rabbit poop litters Washington state

Researchers are searching for and destroying radioactive rabbit poop sprinkled around a shuttered Washington state nuclear plant.

Fri, Oct 09 2009 at 3:14 PM EST
 3

Photo: Echoforsberg/Flickr
This can't be healthy.
 
Researchers have discovered radioactive rabbit poop spread around a shuttered nuclear facility in the state of Washington. In September they flew a helicopter above nearly 16 square miles of land looking for the offending droppings, a result of rabbits licking radioactive salts found in underground lairs dug near buried waste barrels. The researchers flew a helicopter equipped with a radiation detector, looking for the rabbit poop so that it can be cleaned up.
 
About 50 million gallons of liquid waste from Cold War-era plutonium production were stored in a 13 square mile area in large tanks over 40 years ago. Those tanks also included radioactive cesium and strontium salts which are apparently irresistible to those of the rabbit persuasion.
 
I wonder how many six-legged bunnies or three-eared rabbits are hopping in the woods around those parts? Decades spent licking radioactive salts can't be good for a population.
 
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anonymous
Geoff 10/24/2009 21:24 PM

This is one of many cleanup projects at the site (www.hanford.gov). We're demolishing hundreds of contaminated buildings, digging up millions of cubic yards of contaminated soil, and treating some 50 million gallons of contaminated groundwater each month.

That particular waste site is near the center of our 586-square-mile site, a series of large trenches where contaminated liquids were discharged from

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anonymous
Len 10/17/2009 03:37 AM

The Hanford Site is perhaps the most underestimated Superfund Site in all of the USA. The amount of toxic radioactive waste stored on this site is simply staggering. Much of the waste products will remain radioactive for the next 50,000 Years. Nothing man made will be able to contain this stuff for that long and it is inevitable all these nuclides will contaminate the groundwater that will make Chernobyl pale.

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anonymous
RangerMatt 10/12/2009 00:37 AM

There seems to be a bigger problem here than radioactive rabbit poo in that if the rabbits could get to those salts and lick on them, what's keeping the stuff from leaking into an aquifer or contaminating other groundwater sources? If a jackrabbit can get to it, what else can and where is it going?

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