Why Riechers and I do not sleep well at night. <G>
We are right close to the Columbia river and the Columbia gorge. We get very strong east winds and they come from Hanford which is one of if not the world's largest storage for waste uranium and they also have the same type of nuke plant as in Japan. Several years back I bought the potassium iodide pills because of that but never thought they could come in handy because of Japan. Funny world.
Does this blow your mind?:
<The Hanford Site is a mostly decommissioned nuclear production complex on the Columbia River in the U.S. state of Washington, operated by the United States federal government. The site has been known by many names, including Hanford Works, Hanford Engineer Works or HEW, Hanford Nuclear Reservation or HNR, and the Hanford Project. Established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project in the town of Hanford in south-central Washington, the site was home to the B Reactor, the first full-scale plutonium production reactor in the world.[1] Plutonium manufactured at the site was used in the first nuclear bomb, tested at the Trinity site, and in Fat Man, the bomb detonated over Nagasaki, Japan.
During the Cold War, the project was expanded to include nine nuclear reactors and five large plutonium processing complexes, which produced plutonium for most of the 60,000 weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.[2][3] Nuclear technology developed rapidly during this period, and Hanford scientists produced many notable technological achievements. Many of the early safety procedures and waste disposal practices were inadequate, and government documents have since confirmed that Hanford's operations released significant amounts of radioactive materials into the air and the Columbia River, which threatened the health of residents and ecosystems.[4]
The weapons production reactors were decommissioned at the end of the Cold War, but the manufacturing process left behind 53 million U.S. gallons (204,000 m³) of high-level radioactive waste that remains at the site.[5] This represents two-thirds of the nation's high-level radioactive waste by volume.[6] Today, Hanford is the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States[7][8] and is the focus of the nation's largest environmental cleanup.[2]
en.wikipedia.org
BTW we are right in target zone for one of the big subduction earthquakes.
earthquake.usgs.gov
<Though the Sumatra and Cascadia subduction zones differ, Witter says, a tsunami here would be much the same.
"The geology and numerical models predict tsunamis could reach as high as 80 to 100 feet in Oregon, which is similar to the tsunami that struck Sumatra," Witter says. "We need to be very cautious and prepare for that event. It may not happen in a person's lifetime, but if it does, it's going to be equivalent to a Katrina-like event."
oregonlive.com |
