A Plea for Help
Those steel tanks you see are some of the 177 that contain 53 million gallons of heavy metals, acids and solvents. They also contain plutonium, cesium, strontium and uranium. All are buried underground.
Of those 177, sixty-seven are confirmed leakers, meaning their contents are leaching into the soil and headed toward the Columbia River. Most have exceeded their anticipated 50 year life span, creating fear of a catastrophic tank failure.
Thousands of tons of radioactive and hazardous waste has been buried in unlined landfills and 450 billion gallons of liquid waste has been poured into ponds, ditches and drainfields at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in the state of Washington.
Depending on whom you ask, emissions from air travel make up 2-6 percent of the planet’s total CO2 emissions (as a whole, the transportation sector makes up about a quarter of those emissions). But airlines in particular have been getting a bad rap among some in the environmental community because of it, and a recent conference of European airline industries debated how to brighten their image.
