There are no reports of damage at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state from a magnitude 2.8 earthquake that hit an area near on Saturday, an agency spokesperson said this week.
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said the quake hit about 2.5 miles south of Richland, Wash., which is itself about 15 miles south by road from Hanford’s southern gate. It was a magnitude 2.83 quake, more than 900 times smaller than what USGS considers to be a moderate quake, according to a calculator the agency maintains on its website.
For comparison, an earthquake that hit Washington, D.C. in 2011 was a magnitude 5.8 temblor, according to USGS.
“There were no reports of impact to buildings or projects from the earthquake,” A Hanford spokesperson said by email Wednesday.
Hanford is the site of the largest liquid-radioactive-waste cleanup managed by the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management. The former plutonium production complex has about 56 million gallons of radioactive waste, left over from decades of plutonium production, and held in underground tanks.
