This image provided by the U.S. Department of Energy shows a 20-foot by 20-foot hole in the roof of a storage tunnel at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation near Richland, Washington. (Image: AP)
Spokane: A portion of an underground tunnel containing rail cars filled with radioactive waste collapsed at a sprawling storage facility in a remote area of Washington state, forcing an evacuation of some workers at the site that made plutonium for nuclear weapons for decades after World War II.
Officials detected no release of radiation at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and no workers were injured, said Randy Bradbury, a spokesman for the Washington state Department of Ecology.
No workers were inside the tunnel when it collapsed on Tuesday, causing soil on the surface above to sink two to four feet (half to 1.2 meters) over a 400 square foot (37.1 square meters) area, officials said.
The tunnels are hundreds of feet long, with about eight feet (2.4 meters) of soil covering them, the US Department of Energy said.
The cause of the collapse was not immediately known.
It was discovered as part of a routine inspection and occurred during a massive cleanup that has been under way since the 1980s and costs more than USD 2 billion a year. The work is expected to take until 2060 and cost more than $100 billion.
Hanford officials said they were studying the area of the collapse to determine how to create a barrier between the contaminated equipment in the tunnel and the outside air.
Workers near the site were evacuated and hundreds of others farther away were told to remain indoors for several hours, the federal agency said.
Source: News18