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Your stimulus dollars at work: the hunt for radioactive rabbit poo
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The Hanford Rabbit (Twilight Zone)
In spite of promises of transparency and the campaign crapola assuring taxpayers they wouldn’t be robbed by earmarks, the Great American Bail-out – a.k.a. stimulus package, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), NRDS (No Reach-around During Screwing) – was chock full of shockingly idiotic waste.
This act tore millions from your pocket for (among thousands of projects) Senator John Murtha’s ‘airport for nobody’, $3.4 million for an underground wildlife tunnel in Florida, $50 millon for fish food and $300,000 to rid Hanford, Washington of radioactive rabbit scat.
Hanford, which used to be a small agricultural community, was condemned by the Federal Government in 1943 in order to make room for nuclear production facilities that were part of the infamous Manhattan Project.
The Hanford site made the plutonium needed for the atomic bombs, and the weapons produced there resulted in more than 33 million cubic meters (43 million cubic yards) of radioactive waste and over 100 million cubic meters (over 130 million cubic yards) of contaminated soil and debris.
According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, an estimated 50 million gallons of liquid wastes from Cold War plutonium-production processes -- laced with radioactive cesium and strontium salts -- were dumped in a 13.7-square-mile area south of central Hanford's 177 underground radioactive waste tanks.
The salts, it turns out, were a tasty treat for the local jackrabbit population, and after enjoying a lick or twenty, the floppy-eared residents would deposit remnants of their radioactive meals throughout the Hanford area.
But thanks to Nevada-based National Security Technologies and $300,000 in stimulus dollars, the contaminated excrement is being hunted down with a helicopter and mapped with GPS technology.
As a result of the stimulus cash, the poo can now be found and removed in days rather than the months it would take a crew on the ground to sniff-out the tainted pellets.
Once collected, the droppings are transferred to a Hanford landfill where mildly radioactive debris is dumped, covered and protected.
The company responsible for much of the area’s environmental clean-up (a project that began in 1989) – CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. – would offer no estimates on the amount of radioactive dung collected thus far.
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