Hanford officials are testing a new robotic arm to clean up
radioactive sludge stored at Hanford near the Columbia River in
southcentral Washington.
Posted: Thursday, October 15, 2009
The Hanford Nuclear Reservation still has 53 million gallons of
radioactive sludge sitting in leak-prone underground tanks. Now, the
federal government is testing a new robotic arm that officials say
will clean out those tanks more quickly. Richland Correspondent
Anna King saw the new technology in action.
There’s no radioactive sludge in this gargantuan test tank, but it’s
perfect place to practice using a massive telescoping, water
spraying, swiveling robotic arm.
The $6 million machine looks like something out of Starwars.
Federal and state officials hope it’s the answer to their sticky
radioactive waste problem. All this radioactive sludge was created
during WWII and the Cold War, so it’s compacted since then. Some
of it is like hardened salt cake. Nancy Uziemblo is with
Washington’s Ecology Department.
Uziemblo: “I think this has real potential to take more waste out
and it’s bigger, we can reach corners that we’ve never been able
to reach before. The waste that sits at the edges and the sides and
the bottom is very hard to reach.”
It will take a year before this 40 foot robotic arm is usable in a real
tank. The next big challenge, cutting off the top of one of these
waste tanks to get the robotic arm inside.
Copyright 2009 Northwest Public Radio