Such a Waste

The United States made its last nuclear bomb in 1989. Since then, we've dismantled two-thirds of our peak arsenal of 60,000 weapons.

But the bombs are just one deadly legacy of the arms race. Fifty-three million gallons of radioactive waste left over from making nuclear weapons sit in leaky storage tanks on the Hanford Military Reservation in southeast Washington state.

The military built the concrete and steel tanks in the 1950s to hold any bomb waste they didn't know what else to do with. Each tank is four stories tall and half again as wide as a basketball court. There are now 177 tanks at Hanford and about 100 others scattered at places like Savannah and Oak Ridge. The federal debate about what to do with the waste has lasted for decades.

Unfortunately, Hanford did not design its tanks to last beyond the 1970s. As the tanks aged, 67 leaked and allowed 1 million gallons of radioactive waste to seep into the ground.

That leaked waste is now slowly making its way towards the Columbia River, about seven miles away. Now the Department of Energy must clean up the spill and empty the tanks before more leaks spring.

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