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The Department of Energy has declared an emergency at a nuclear-contaminated site in Washington state, after soil caved in over a portion of a tunnel containing rail cars contaminated with nuclear waste.


"All personnel in the immediate area have been accounted for — they are safe — and there is no evidence of a radiological release," Destry Henderson, spokesperson for the Hanford site's emergency operations center, said in 

.

Some employees were evacuated and others were told to move indoors as a "precaution," officials say. Anna King of the Northwest News Network, a public radio station collaboration, 

 approximately 3,000 other workers in the area were originally taking cover indoors. Nonessential employees have since been sent home, and essential employees were instructed to avoid the site of the tunnel.



The Hanford Site, about 150 miles southeast of Seattle, is a former nuclear production complex and home to a long-running, 

 cleanup operation.
It's generally regarded as the most contaminated nuclear site in America. The Department of Energy 

 it's the most challenging of the government's nuclear cleanup projects, with millions of tons and hundreds of billions of gallons of nuclear waste.



The Department of Energy says a 20-foot-by-20-foot section of soil caved in where two underground tunnels meet next to the Plutonium Uranium Extraction Facility, known as the PUREX plant. The cave-in was discovered during routine surveillance.

The tunnels in question were storing rail cars that once carried radioactive nuclear fuel from reactors to production facilities, back when the site was still used to manufacture nuclear weapons. Each tunnel is hundreds of feet long, the Hanford Site says, made of wood and concrete and covered with about 8 feet of soil. A 20-foot-long section appears to have collapsed.

"There is no indication of a release of contamination at this point," the Department of Energy says.

"Officials continue to monitor the air and are working on how they will fix the hole in the tunnel roof," the Hanford Emergency Information site announced. "They are looking at options that would provide a barrier between the contaminated equipment in the tunnel and the outside air that would not cause the hole in the tunnel's roof to widen."


The site of the collapse had been previously identified as a potential hazard, the Northwest News Network 


The governor of Washington, Jay Inslee, says there are "many questions" about how the collapse happened, 

 member station Oregon Public Broadcasting.


"We'll have to get to the bottom of that," he said. "At the moment we're focusing on the safety of workers and making sure there's no release beyond [the] immediate site."

, and the challenges of cleaning up nuclear waste, late last year, as part of a project about the environmental impact of the U.S. military in the Northwest:


Disasters

The U.S. Department of Energy says personnel have been evacuated at the Hanford Site, a cleanup location in Washington. A tunnel containing contaminated railroad cars has caved in.

Emergency declared at nuclear-contaminated site in Washington state

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