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Why war? Exhibit takes on a burning question

Atom bomb replicas
Replicas of the first atomic bombs, Little Boy and Fat Man, are on display in the “Why War” exhibit at the Flying Heritage Collection in Everett, Wash. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

EVERETT, Wash. – The idea behind the Flying Heritage Collection’s groundbreaking new exhibit about the causes and effects of conflict, “Why War,” was born five years ago – and the man behind the idea is none other than Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who owns the collection.

“He’s the ‘Idea Man,’ as you know,” said Adrian Hunt, the collection’s executive director, referring to Allen’s memoir.

The Flying Heritage Collection shows off scores of historic aircraft and other military artifacts in a 57,000-square-foot hangar complex next to Everett’s Paine Field, including a German V-2 rocket, a Soviet Scud missile system and a couple of tanks.

Hunt recalled that Allen raised a big-picture question during a conversation about the collection and its future: “At some level, don’t we just have a lot of weapons on display? … We should do something to provide some context.”

That set off years of thinking and designing, aimed at putting together an interactive exhibit to explain why conflicts arise, how warfare has changed, and how war affects societies. Hunt says the resulting 2,500-square-foot exhibit, which opens to the public on March 4, is the only one of its kind in the U.S.

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Need for nuclear option explained, with toasters

If renewable energy is on the rise in America, why should we even bother with nuclear power? Seattle tech maverick Nathan Myhrvold, who’s backing a next-generation nuclear venture called TerraPower, explains the rationale in terms of toasters.

Myhrvold lays out his toaster analogy in an extended video clip from “Nova: The Nuclear Option,” a PBS documentary that premieres tonight.

The program looks at the prospects for nuclear power five years after an earthquake and tsunami dealt a crippling blow to Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant. Fukushima’s foul-up dealt a blow to nuclear power’s image as well, but tonight’s show focuses on next-generation technologies aimed at making fission-generated power safer and easier to manage.

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Contamination found at another Hanford tank

Image: Double-shell tank
This graphic shows a cutaway view of a double-shell nuclear waste storage tank at the Hanford Site. (Credit: Washington State Department of Ecology)

Workers at Eastern Washington’s Hanford Site are trying to track down the source of radioactive contamination at an underground waste storage tank, one week after an internal leak sparked concern about a different tank at the facility.

Both double-walled tanks were put into service 45 years ago to hold radioactive and chemical wastes from plutonium production for the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Each tank is 75 feet wide and can hold a million gallons of waste.

One of the tanks, AY-102, has been the subject of concern for years. That’s where an alarm went off on April 17, when liquid waste and sludge leaked through the tank’s inner wall and built up to a depth of 8 inches in the space between the inner and outer walls.

That leak was cleaned up, and nearly all of the waste that was in AY-102 has been transferred to other storage tanks. But now the U.S. Department of Energy says air filter samples from the space between the walls in the other tank, AY-101, registered higher than normal levels of radioactive contamination this month.

“While these readings were higher than normal, they were well below the alarm level,” the Energy Department’s Office of River Protection said in a statement.

So far, visual inspections and detection instruments have shown no evidence of a leak in the tank’s inner wall, but workers at the Energy Department and its contractor for the tank farms, Washington River Protection Solutions, are continuing to look. “DOE is conducting engineering analysis and assessments to determine potential causes of the readings,” the department said.

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Hanford waste removal resumes after leak check

Workers install transfer lines in March to connect the equipment for transferring toxic waste from Hanford’s Tank AY-102 to another double-shell tank. (Credit: DOE)
Workers install transfer lines in March to connect the equipment for transferring toxic waste from Hanford’s Tank AY-102 to another double-shell tank. (Credit: DOE)

The U.S. Department of Energy says there’s no sign that toxic waste has leaked into the environment from a double-shell storage tank at Eastern Washington’s Hanford Site, and it has resumed operations to remove the waste from the tank.

Last weekend, an alarm was set off when sensors detected that the level of sludge had risen to about 8 inches deep in the space between the inner and outer walls of Tank AY-102.

Leaks in the inner wall of that underground tank have been causing problems for years, and last month, workers began pumping the mixed radioactive and chemically toxic waste out of the tank for storage in other double-shell tanks. Even before the procedure began, planners determined there was a chance that disturbing the material in AY-102 could cause more waste to leak into the space between the walls.

“We were prepared for this event,” Glyn Trenchard, the Energy Department’s deputy assistant manager for Hanford’s tank farms, said April 21 in a statement.

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Nuclear waste leak triggers alarm at Hanford

Image: Double-shell tank
This graphic shows a cutaway view of a double-shell nuclear waste storage tank at the Hanford Site. Liquid waste has pooled up in the space between the inner and outer shell of one tank, designated AY-102. (Credit: Washington State Department of Ecology)

A long-simmering leak inside a double-walled nuclear waste storage tank at the Hanford Site in Eastern Washington got worse over the weekend, sparking an alarm, officials said today.

Online reports from the Tri-City Herald and KING-TV said that the leak detection alarm came on Sunday morning, and that radioactive waste had pooled between the inner and outer shell of Hanford’s Tank AY-102 to a depth of about 8 inches. By today, the waste level had dropped slightly, the U.S. Department of Energy said in a statement emailed to GeekWire.

The Washington State Department of Ecology said there was “no indication of waste leaking into the environment or risk to the public at this time.”

KING quoted a former Hanford worker, Mike Geffre, as saying the leak had become catastrophic. “This is probably the biggest event to ever happen in tank farm history,” he said.

Today’s statements from federal and state officials made the situation sound less dire, however.

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