So, what happened here? What kind of spill happened? There's such little public info easily available about this it seems, but maybe I'm just bad at searching late at night.
> a visible breach was identified in the stainless steel liner at the floor of the sump, which is believed to have occurred at some point in the past operation of the facility. Some contaminated material might have historically leaked through the breached liner and concrete floor through corrosion or by following an expansion joint or crack in the concrete floor slab.
From OP’s third link.
This sounds like the report I'm actually asking for.
There are many possible research activities that take under fume hoods in chemistry labs and hot cells in radiation labs.
At Hanford scientists were interested in both charting the radioactive decay breakdowns and half lives of elements ( a huge tree of branches and possibilities ) and in weapons development - studying the properties of various clumps of matter wrt how well they absorbed particles, emmitted particles, focused particles, etc.
When (for example) milling a disc of material, there will be waste, when using beakers, they will be flushed and washed out .. all this leads to material going down a drain and into a holding sump.
Ideally the sumps are cleaned out, even when hazardous, but eventually many sumps will crack and leak material.
Several Hanford sumps leaked - as did multitudes of Hanford waste barrels.
People were pretty much learning and developing procedures on the flay in these early days of atomic fever.
And even then the most detailed explanation in all the links given above just mention some sump that had a crack in it or something. It still doesn't actually describe what was going on one the "hot cell" that led to leaks. Someone tip over a drum of nasty stuff? They washing exposed stuff in there? Not a lot of actual details on what went on in there.
There's no "on October 2nd 1983 operator John Smith actuated the robotic arm incorrectly knocking over the canister of strontium..."
People were protesting from pretty early on. Students, hippies etc. They cared, but the establishment didn’t.