@RexRed,
You really do have little understanding of the extent of your ignorance, which is broad, pervasive and profound. You don't know what you don't know or understand, and you don't make allowance for it. That is the difference between ignorant and stupid. You are stupid.
The tanks you noted have nothing whatever to do with the generation of electrical power by nuclear reactors ... zip, nada. They are a relic of the WWII effort to design and construct nuclear weapons - all done in a hurry in the early 1940s due to the war effort, and long before out modern safety standards for radionuclides were in effect. In those days you could still buy a wristwatch with a (powerfully) radioactive radium dial; construction workers happily wrapped loose asbestos sheets around pipes; most adults smoked cigarettes; etc. - all activities involving much more health risk than that posed by the leaking tanks.
The site in Question is at Hanford Washington. It's a very empty and dry desert area in Eastern Washington, that, precisely because of its remoteness, was selected in 1942 as a site for the Manhattan Project's effort to produce plutonium for nuclear bombs. We then had two parallel projects for the construction of nuclear weapons; (1) a uranium bomb with the enrichment facility located at Oak Ridge Tenn.; and (2) a plutonium bomb with the production facility located in Hanford Washington.
The Hanford site is the property of the U.S. Government and is run by the Department of Energy - the department that wasted billions on Solyndra and other foolish scams. The process of separating plutonium from spent nuclear fuel involves dissolving it in nitric acid and chemically precipitating the plutonium from the solution. This, otherwise very simple process involved large quantities of highly acidic waste, also containing other radioactive elements in the dissolved spent fuel. It would have been easy to precipitate them out as well, and to store them in compact shielded containers, leaving the highly acidic solution to be chemically neutralised - all easily done. However, in the midst of the urgency and haste of the war effort, none of that was done. Instead they constructed some 230 large underground tanks in which they dumped the process residue. The stuff has been sitting there for almost 70 years - the government never got around to start emptying the tanks and processing the conternts until about five years ago. Instead they spent 50 years "studying the problem" - something no private utility would ever do.
Finally after all this delay the Energy Department has started to empty the tanks and process the waste in them. A few of the tanks have known leaks, and there is a small plume of detectable radiation under them. In all this time it has moved only a few feet in the dry, desert soil. For the past 20 years Washington State and the Federal government have conducted a ritual around federal budget time. Whenever the state becomes concerned about the level of funding for the agonizingly slow cleanup effort, it issues dire announcments about the leaking tanks The Department of Energy then gets off its ass - a little. This is the current year ritual. It has more to do with the State's concerns about the Energy Department budget than the risks posed by the leakage.
I know a lot about this because I was once the CEO of the company performing the Engineering and Construction activities at the Hanford site.
You would be much wiser to spend your time educating yourself in the basic physics and thermodymamics of these issues that just randomly perusing web sites for out of context iunformation you are unable to comprehend or interpret.
