Roy Sickle and Bob Fox, Waste Management Northwest sampling technicians, had 32 tiny and medium-sized bottles to fill with water pumped from the well. The bottles ended up at the Quanterra Inc. lab in Richland, where ground water samples are tested for a long list of radioactive and nonradioactive contaminants. This is how scientists track the complicated crazy-quilt array of subterranean plumes of radioactive and nonradioactive substances oozing beneath Hanford. Right now, Hanford's picture of these plumes is incomplete and hazy. Each soil captures, speeds up or slows down different contaminants.
Different contaminants move at different speeds.
And if substances combine, the new mixture could seep through the soil differently than its components. Tritium is the fastest - moving at the same rate as water. Technetium 99 flows almost as fast and is used as a way to try to track the possible front of a plume coming from the main radioactive waste tanks in central Hanford. Each radioactive substance decays at a different rate, which also slowly changes the underground picture. That means it will likely decay significantly before a technology can be developed and installed to pump it out of the ground to treat it, several Hanford experts say.