"“This is 2018. We shouldn't still be contaminating people with plutonium,” said a worker at the Hanford site in eastern Washington."
"As November turned to December, rumors spread through the western corner of the former nuclear weapons plant in eastern Washington. Bo-J and his anxious coworkers at the old Hanford plant would talk on lunch breaks about radioactive particles showing up on gear, and newly roped-off areas of contamination.
“There was talk, not real clarification,” Bo-J told BuzzFeed News. “Next thing you know — boom! — a stop-work.”
On Dec. 13, 2017, after the gear on half a dozen employees had tested “hot,” labor unions refused to keep working, and demolition ground to a halt. It was the beginning of one of the worst contamination events at Hanford, a sprawling site that once produced the plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki and whose cleanup will take most of this century.
The company running this project, a government contractor called CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Company, quickly agreed to the union demands, and work resumed. But just one day later, hot particles were found outside of the fenced-off demolition site — an ominous sign that the radioactivity had not been contained."
Zahra Hirji reports for BuzzFeed News Reporter July 19, 2018.
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