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U.S. Nuclear Cleanup Carries Major Risks
Roland Piquepaille writes "New Scientist reports in this pretty alarming article that there is a 50-50 chance of a major radiation or chemical accident during the cleanup of the dirtiest nuclear site in the U.S. There are indeed lots of things to clean at the Hanford complex in Washington state: 67 tons of plutonium and 190 million liters of liquid radioactive waste stored in underground tanks. A third of them, dating from the Cold War, have already leaked 4 million liters in the environment, contaminating the groundwater and a river. Meanwhile, officials at the DOE, who'll spend $50 billion between now and 2035 on this cleanup, seem less worried than the different specialists interviewed by New Scientist. Please read this overview for selected quotes from the article and from the Hanford site. You'll also find a slide from the DOE showing the timeframe for the cleanup."
I've got to start reading the submitter's name more often. Every time I click through on a story Roland's submitted, I feel I've been duped. You're welcome, RP.
Is there any way I can configure my slash options to ignore his stories altogether?
The cure for cancer is coming: Reovirus
I do not usually comment but I would like to remind everyone that the river mentioned would be the Columbia River since Hanford is within sight of the river and a large number of fish spawn there every year.
...was the lifetime production of the facility, not material to be cleaned up as implied.
There are indeed lots of things to clean at the Hanford complex in Washington state: 67 tons of plutonium
Actually, from the article, the 67 tons of Plutonium were the product of the Handford site, not a side-effect left littering the place.
Note, before anyone starts whining about nuclear power not being clean, that Hanford isn't about nuclear power, but about nuclear weapons.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Considering the fact that the material has to be moved, every consideration must be made to properly secure the material from accidents and theft.
DOE is more than capable of doing this and have done so for many years. Admittedly there have been a few problems but it never started a real situation of calamatious proportions.
I almost signed up to work for DOE in this team capacity after i got out of the Army as a RANGER and i was very impressed with the security, armament and professionalism these folks have at hand. I just did not like the hours.
+++Warning to any fool that thinks it's easy to steal radioactive material from one of these teams. You'll die twice before you get to pull your trigger once!+++
Cyberzephyr
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
Hanford isn't a nuclear plant, it was a nuclear weapons research facility that also mass-produced plutonium for nuclear weapons.
Moreover, Hanford was one of the places where we found out about dangerous isotopes and how to handle them. It wasn't run properly and in fact hardly could have been. Not to say that there weren't huge screwups there, but comparing this to a well run nuclear power plant is just wrong.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
The production schedule for the new Vitrification Plant is far ahead of the basic science and engineering that form the foundation for its construction. Although I do not think that they will operate it with the risks for steam explosion that the article alludes to, it is more likely that the tax payers will pay more than the estimated $7B to construct it.
You heard it right, folks - $7B.
As for the groundwater contamination, that is nothing new. A tritium plume extending from the 200 Areas (where plutonium separation was performed) to the Columbia River has been in place since production started. It has fluctuated in size according to the politics of weapons production. The facilities have been shut down since the early 90's and are in various stages of decommissioning.
The issue of iodine-129 is a sticky point. It has a long half-life and had been dumped to the soil column without too much worry about the transport properties of the nuclide. It travels at the same rate through the vadose and groundwater as nitrate. It is very mobile. The toxicity of the isotope is in come dispute. I can get a higher radiation dose from a urniary test than I can get from consuming contaminated Hanford groundwater. I can also dispose of the contamination through my municipal water treatment facility, a practice prohibited for Hanford contractors.
As for the cesium-137 and strontium-90, those isotopes bind to soils high in the vadose and rarely reach groundwater. The are confined to zones near the surface, far from the river, and will be left in place to decay to background beneath low permeability covers. This is not a practice that the USDOE is forcing on the local community, but is a treatment alternative that is accepted by the USEPA and Washington Deparment of Ecology.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Plutonium's chemical toxicity is minor compared to its radiological abilities. IF plutonium reaches soft tissues (like your lungs), its alpha emissions will begin to systematically destroy your tissues and DNA. By the time the chemical toxicity comes into play, you'll be long dead from radiation exposure.
The key here is that Plutonium is rather hard to get into your system. In order to get it into your lungs, it has to be powderized AND airborne. Both are very difficult as Plutonium is hard and heavy. Ingestion is another possibility, but it seems that the Pu is generally passed through without ill effects. Again, it's very hard to disintegrate, so your body often fails to digest it. This makes Plutonium very dangerous on one hand, yet very, very safe on another. You could keep a piece of it in your pocket, and in general there will never be any ill effects.
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The contaminated river in question is the Columbia. As the second-largest river (by flow) in the lower 48, and the largest to drain into the eastern Pacific ocean, I think it merits a mention by name.
But then I'm a local, so I'm biased.
Thankfully, the large flow means that the contamination is pretty dilute. The bad news, of course, is that said contamination flows through quite a few populated areas (including Portland), the river is used to irrigate and transport zillions of tons of wheat and other edibles, and lots of fish get pulled from the river and eaten.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Let's Ask Google Calculator. Oh. 50m gallons is 190m litres.
John.
IAAHG ( I am a hydrogeologist ), or at least was an one point. People do not understand the effects of time on engineerd materials. Most engineered materails have a usefull life of a few decades or less. You new roof is water tight today, but come back in 50 years and it will leak like a sive.
The uinderground environment is a hostile one. There water continually percolating through the ground. This water may or may not be acidic, and may or may not be under perssure. Almost no rock is impervious. It may only leak a little but over 100s or 1000s or yeah a little becomes a lot.
Anything will leak. The questions are:
-At what rate
-And where will the leakage go
-What happens when some idiot archeaologist 500 years from now opens it up?
...if the reactors in question were nuclear plants, then so was the small research reactor at the Univ. of Washington.
The link in one of the parents was trying to relate the activities at Hanford (creation of nuclear materials for weapons and research) vs those of a commercial power-generating nuclear reactor.
The parent article to yours was dismissing this link, and then you try to casually deconstruct it and say, essentially, that any nuclear reactor is a nuclear plant.
FWIW, Cobalt-60 is probably even more dangerous than Pu-238, as are any number of non-nuclear chemicals. A drop of some organophosphates on the back of your hand can kill you within 10 minutes.
Malathion is a mild organophosphate. It is much easier to buy Malathion than it is plutonium.
While it is fine to worry a bit about this, it is probably safe to say that the concentration of naturally occuring radioactives in coal fly ash is probably a bigger, much more widespread deal.
Hanford's problems look sexy and dangerous, but are they really? Is the population of the Tri-cities, Portland, Kelso and Longview suddenly at a huge risk of getting various forms of cancer compared to all the other existing environmental factors?
The US Government managed to clean up the Rocky Mountain Arsenal and Rocky Flats, in Colorado...
Besides, the DOE has been worrying and trying to figure out this problem for at least 20 years. A former boss of mine's father used to punch test and monitoring wells all over the area, long before I knew him. A former girlfriend worked on a research program to help figure out a way to monitor the most notorious tank.
a big problem is that they simply do not know what they are dealing with in the tanks. It's toxic, it's radioactive, a couple of them vent hydrogen, but they do not even know if the mere act of taking samples at various depths in the tanks might disturb them enough to cause problems...
Having an Uncle who for some years was in charge of the cleanup at Hanford and noting that he lives in Kelso I would tend to discount the FUD a lot. (About 99.999999999% or more.) Having two other Uncles who were reactor operations officers for US Nuke Subs makes me have a bit of family based info on the topic. I just am not as worried as most people are because I know generally what the problem is and how big it is.
To be sure the mess at Hanford is a serious mess. It involves largely the chemicals used to refine the various elemements after reactor actions. The reason they liked plutonium for bombs is that it could be bred out of lesser stuff and was easily chemically isolated. This gave rise to a lot of radioactive chemical wastes which bluntly were pretty reactive stuff.
The problem was storage was at best using technology we had at the time rather than trying to deal perminanently. The problem is that many of these chemical wastes are liquid and they are stored in containers that are failing or have started to fail.
The containers in many cases were about equal to swimming pools or to 55 gallon drums. Another problem is some of these elements migrate quite easily through barriers. They form all sorts of funny deposits which if struck are prone to catch fire.
With all of this said, the whole problem is one more of time and effort than danger. The location is really pretty unlikely to see a lot of migration outside Hanford and if it does go into the Columbia River it will be diluted well below any level of concern. The river is not small. At nearly 100,000 CFS flow and shortly diluted to 200,000 CFS average flow, this stuff is gone... gone... gone.
To explain a bit more, the problem here is largely one of timing and events. Most of this waste developed right during and shortly after WW2. Shall I say that priorities and for that matter knowlege have changed in the intervening years.
Actually the biggest problem in the cleanup owes to the need not to actually create more contaminated waste than absolutely necessary while doing the clean up.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
I did a short research paper on Hanford, so I think I might be able to answer this a bit.
The problems at Hanford are mainly due to one of two things: age (some of the reactors and processing plants date back to WWII, when the effects of radioactivity was still not well understood) and purpose (Hanford was designed to extract Plutonium (Pu); only one of its reactors ever produced electrical power, and that was a secondary purpose)
First off, age. Hanford was built in WWII with exceedingly great haste, and disposal of wastes was put on the back-burner as something that can wait until after the war. Then the cold-war began, and while procedures improved somewhat, proper disposal was still a secondary concern. With the reactors themselves, all except one of the reactors there are "single-pass" reactors, meaning that instead of recycling its coolant, it just pumped it in from the Columbia River, sent it through the reactor, then (after letting it cool for a little bit) sent it back to the river.
The other problem is the Plutonium processing. This generated a lot of highly radioactive and toxic chemical wastes, which were (depending on how radioactive it was) stored in leak-prone tanks (although they have since moved most of the waste to better double-shelled tanks) or dumped directly to the ground.
So, to answer your question, I would presume that a modern nuclear power plant would be much less of a problem to deal with, since it would be built to use recycled coolant. There is still the problem of the spent feul rods, however (and here I'm not so sure, because I didn't study about modern practices so much) if handled properly from the outset, they could be stored safely enough to avoid environmental contamination. Perhaps someone with knowledge on modern nuclear power plants could better answer that part, though.
This is because coal contains trace amounts of these elements, which are not in the form of particles, but are more likely distributed as individual atoms in individual molecules, maybe combined with carbon, certainly oxygen, and other elements. No known technology can take individual molecules of, say, uranium oxide, out of a chimney.
Now this release of radionucleides has been going on since serious use of coal began around 1600-1700.
Interestingly enough, in the UK there is often controversy over so-called leukaemia clusters, now these cases are tragic, but it is alleged that they are due to the nuclear industry, however close inspection shows that every single such cluster, with one exception, is in an area close to or downwind of a large coal-burning plant which either still exists, or was in use relatively recently. Some of these plants were lead smelters, which adds more uranium and other toxic elements. The one exception that I know of, where no industrial presence can be seen, is in Cornwall, around the village of Tintagel, and it is hardly surprising, because the local children no doubt play on their nice beach, and behind the beach are sea caves, with uranium compounds leaching out of the rocks. There will also be a high concentration of radon gas in such places, it mainly causes lung cancer by depositing daughter products in the lungs, but some of the daughter products may indeed cause leukaemia, and may be ingested in other ways.
At a guess, I would say that similar conditions of radiation release due to coal burning, and the extraction of certain other minerals, will be found worldwide, as presumably volcanic activity had released lots of radionucleides into the atmosphere during the carbiniferous era, which would eventually have found their way into the vegetation, and hence the coal.
In one particular part of the UK, when germanium transistors were in fashion, soot from factory chimneys was collected because it was rich in germanium, I think you will find that other elements (certainly selenium, which is toxic and carcinogenic, and also cadmium) can be found in significant quantities in some geographic regions.
So, coal burning will release radioactive, toxic and carcinogenic substances, fortunately not plutonium of course, although in theory an occasional atom might be formed by natural processes. After all, there are these odd atoms of uranium embedded in the moderator, coal instead of pure graphite, so there is the remote chance that a neutron from a fissioning uranium atom might be slowed by the coal, and captured by another uranium atom. But the yield would be incredibly low.
France does plutonium reprocessing, in fact they reprocess HUGE amounts of waste. It's our current policy of "no reprocessing == minimized proliferation" that is causing this waste nightmare. More about this on this PBS frontline special.
I worked on a congressional race in the Tri-Cities a few years back and went on a day-long tour of the Hanford facilities with the candidate, got presentations on how they were handling the many different kinds of nuclear waste.
I don't know what was my favourite. Was it the nuclear waste that was being stored in what amounted to two coffee cans? The containment tubes rated to last 10-20 years that had been holding waste for 50?
I'm thinking I'll have to go with the underground spillover tanks. There'd be a bunch of series of 5 tanks. When tank 1 fills up, waste spills over into tank 2. Tank 2 fills up, spills into tank 3. So on and so forth until you get to tank 5 where when it fills up, the waste apparently just spills out into the ground. Naturally, they weren't meant to last this long either.
So in addition to the nuclear waste, you have to deal with all the contaminated soil and whatnot too. US Gov't really clusterfucked the area. Fortunately, the state gov't(led by AG Gregoire) nailed their balls to an agreement to clean up all this shit.
That being said, it's a neat facility and everyone was friendly and eager to show what they were doing. There are a lot of interesting plume diagrams showing how the contamination is making its way to the Columbia River.
Another good post by an AC. Coal kills many, many people each year.
A study by Abt Associates estimated that coal power plants *in the US alone* kill 24,000 people *per year*. That's just the deaths; there were also 38,000 non-fatal heart attacks, 554,000 asthma attacks, and 3 million lost workdays. On the other hand, deaths due to nuclear power plant radiation *in the whole world* (almost exclusively from Chernobyl, which was a patently stupid event from a horribly archaic design) range from the low thousands to the low tens of thousands, and between the upper tens of thousands to the low millions of related diseases - in the 50 years since the world's first nuclear power plant. In the US, nuclear power plant-related casualties are hard to estimate because they're so low. Yes, we use more coal power than nuclear - but nowhere close to the scale of health and environmental damage coal causes compared to nuclear.
At the very least, nuclear power is *as safe* as coal power. At best, it puts coal power to shame. And then there's the national security interests of nuclear: some of the most concentrated uranium deposits in the world are in our neighbor to the north, Canada. The world's largest deposits are in another ally, Australia.
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They are talking about this now, too, and they are giving the same completion date, "15 to 30 years from now". That's why I say that apparently nothing has been done, even though they have spent many, many billions.
The glassification plant is being built right now. Construction started about a year ago.
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig