RICHLAND, Wash. (AP) - Hanford workers have dug up and reburied
40,000 tons of carcasses, manure and other waste from
experimental animal farms on the nuclear reservation.

Closure Hanford remediation manager Mark Buckmaster told the
Hanford Advisory Board last week that up to one-thousand animals at
a time were kept at the farm near F Reactor along the banks of the
Columbia River.

They included rodents, cats, dogs, cows, sheep, goats, pigs and
alligators. The animal experiments started during World War Two to
learn the effect of radiation on people. The farm continued to
operate into the 1970s.

Buckmaster says about 95 percent of the waste dug up from
trenches was manure. Quite a bit of it was contaminated with
radioactive strontium 90.

The waste was reburied at the Environmental Restoration Disposal
Facility, a lined landfill for low-level radioactive waste on the
nuclear reservation.