The Hanford site is one of the most polluted places in the country, due to the plutonium production reactors and processing facilities which dumped open waste years before environmental concerns were on the table. They also ran production reactor water straight out into the river and contaminated areas downstream.
The authoritative book on Hanford[0] is published by the DOE. Another excellent book on Hanford and its "sister city" in Russia is Plutopia[1].
I’m hopeful for the future but knowing how Uber capitalists work (I consider myself a capitalist too fwiw) it worries me that we will see worse disasters when private companies everywhere doing nuclear shit.
In addition to the points that the other commenters raised, generally externalities such as pollution are worse when the entity creating the externality does not have to worry about paying for it.
This is why authoritarian governments are especially bad at polluting. Democratic governments are second-worst, since although they may be questioned and legally challenged, governments like to carve out a lot of exceptions for themselves (see things like the Kirtland AFB water pollution). Capitalists, with the power of limited liability behind them, are third-worst, but through careful management of incentives and regulations government can mitigate the issue better than it can mitigate itself.
The Mayak plant, which basically is the Soviet Hanford, neglected any environmental concerns and was the place of the second-worst nuclear incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster
>Initially Mayak dumped high-level radioactive waste into a nearby river, which flowed to the river Ob, flowing farther downstream to the Arctic Ocean. All six reactors were on Lake Kyzyltash and used an open-cycle cooling system, discharging contaminated water directly back into the lake. When Lake Kyzyltash quickly became contaminated, Lake Karachay was used for open-air storage, keeping the contamination a slight distance from the reactors but soon making Lake Karachay the "most-polluted spot on Earth".
Nothing to see here, just glowing, flickering radiation clouds.
> After the explosion, a column of smoke and dust rose to a kilometer high, the dust flickered with an orange-red light and settled on buildings and people.
The authoritative book on Hanford[0] is published by the DOE. Another excellent book on Hanford and its "sister city" in Russia is Plutopia[1].
[0] https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc737111/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutopia