Brush Fire Dirty Bomb?

A human-caused wildfire is burning on the Hanford Reservation in Washington State threatening huge tanks of radio-active waste.

www.tri-cityherald.com...

The fire, driven by strong winds burned east onto the monument and then jumped Highway 240 onto the Hanford nuclear reservation about 4 p.m. Thursday. Firefighters were able to hold it at the fence line of the 200 West Area, which includes underground tanks holding millions of gallons of high-level radioactive waste from the past production of plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons program.

This isn't the first time this has happened. Back in 2000 a similar fire actually resulted in the release of plutonium into the air.

It seems like someone is attempting to use fire as a means of attacking the nuclear waste stored at Hanford. Why not? Why try to import a dirty bomb when all you need is just sitting in the open waiting for a "natural" disaster?

Underground tanks wouldn't be harmed by your average brush fire I wouldn't think. They would be burried deep enough so that even a forest fire overhead wouldn't damage them, no?

I would hope the waste would be stored in a fire-proof manner. But there's radio-active waste stored all over that place in a variety of ways. Here's a story about the 2000 fire where radio-active material was burned.

seattlepi.nwsource.com...