Nuclear cleanup crew: UA researcher among scientists selected for project
Tuscaloosa News – June 3
A University of Alabama researcher has been called to be part of a team of scientists cleaning up the mess left by one of the first nuclear production sites. “I spend a lot of time on this,” said Chunmiao Zheng, a professor of hydrogeology. “This is really my highest priority.” Zheng is studying why a plume of radioactive uranium that leaked underground persists off the banks of the Columbia River in Washington state despite predictions in the 1990s that it would have flowed with the groundwater into the river….The area that Freshly, Zheng and 16 other scientists are studying is part of the Hanford site, set up in 1943 to produce nuclear fuel for bombs. It produced the plutonium in the second atomic bomb dropped on Aug. 9, 1945, onto Nagasaki, Japan…