The scale of the craziness at Hanford in the 50s-60s is difficult to appreciate, or even to imagine. Many of us have taken a lab course in qualitative inorganic analysis. You know, where you dissolve a sample in nitric acid, precipitate with sulfate, filter, redissolve the precipitate, precipitate with sulfide, filter, and so on. Eventually you understand what metals the sample contained.<p>OK, so back in the 50s-6s, that's how they isolated plutonium from neutron-exposed uranium. After aging in water for a few weeks, levels of short-lived fission products were low enough that humans could manipulate the stuff, behind several feet of steel, lead and concrete shielding, without immediately lethal radiation doses.<p>But then, what they did was dissolve this shit in hot nitric acid, in huge steel vessels. With clever mechanical manipulators. Even after aging, however, levels of xenon-133 and iodine-131 were still quite high. And where do you think they went? Up a stack, of course. What else? Abbeit through shielded pipes, to protect workers.<p>But you know, they could only dissolve when the wind was blowing fast enough. Because otherwise, the cloud of xenon-133 and iodine-131 overhead would inflict dangerous radiation exposures to workers. They released <i>a lot</i>:[0]<p>> The formally classified report Dissolving of Twenty Day Metal at Hanford states that Hanford officials initially planned to release approximately 4,000 curies of iodine-131 and 7,900 curies of xenon-133 but ended up releasing in actuality 7,780 curies of iodine-131, along with 20,000 curies of xenon-133 into the surrounding area's atmosphere within a seven-hour period. [1] In comparison, the March 1979 Three Mile Island accident released between 15 and 24 curies of radioactive iodine.<p>But hey, at least they didn't dissolve on days when the wind was blowing west toward Portland or Seattle. Mainly they nuked local subsistence farmers. Iodine-131 has a half-life of just eight days. That's short enough that levels in commercial milk are low enough, given all the delays from feed to cows to stores. But if you lived near Hanford then, and your kids were drinking milk from your own cows or goats, they got dangerous iodine-131 doses to their thyroids.<p>0) <a href="http://www.hanfordproject.com/greenrun.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.hanfordproject.com/greenrun.html</a>