Slashdot Mirror
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'm pretty sure it has caused more health problems in the U.S. than nuclear power has.
When you compare nuclear to oil, where we have to deal with unstable people in an unstable region of the world, it is somewhat safe. Is it perfect? No, but what energy source is? Yes, some are safer/cleaner, but right now, they're also more expensive/more difficult to deploy/etc
I thought that Russia was going to make it their problem? Russia wants to allow the imports of nuclear waste into their country. I can't find it now but I thought that even though world-wide organizations are denouncing this thought the US was happy to ship some over there for permanent storage.
So what happens if this stuff does leak out? Would that be considered a Superfund site? Funding for ecological disaster recovery was slashed by the current administration.
Our world looks better and better ever day.
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"
The river is the Columbia River, an important transportation and power supply for the region.
I live downstream. Would you like to shake any of my three hands?
Look here For a video covering the decommisioning of a small experimental Oxford reactor. Very Very scary (especially pushing graphite blocks into a shredder with no more protection than blue gloves!
Philip
Signatures are broken
Bet the Hotels in that area are pretty cheap!
Plus glow in the dark showers!!
Book me now!
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.
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.
And a 100% chance of a major radiation or chemical accident if they don't. So this really looks to be a non-issue.
Learn to love Alaska
I was interviewed for 3 different jobs doing cleanup at Hanford around 10 years ago. Sort of glad I didn't take any. Talk about a thankless dirty job (we would have been using remote methods, but still). Anyway, two points: a) pollution from nuclear is comparable to pollution from other energy sources. Lead, polonium, mercury, etc just get spread thinner with other methods. Nuclear keeps it concentrated. Call it "choose your poison." Even windmills have been implicated in killing endanged animals (thwack!). b) 60+ tons of plutonium seems a bit high. Not impossible, but a bit high. Given how highly it is sought, you'd think it would have been extracted.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
So, is this all coming from plants that were producing weapons-grade material?
What I'm getting at is, how much of this waste is comparable (in terms of which specific materials, and in what volumes) to what a nuclear powerplant would produce?
I'm not trying to diminish the magnitude of the mess or the impact it has on the area, but I can already see people taking this and running in the wrong direction with it - namely, that every nuclear power plant will produce this sort of mess over time. I *believe* this is the exception rather than the rule, because this site was/is producing weapons material rather than electricity, but it'd be great if someone with hard data could confirm/invalidate that...
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
I thought that would be a great idea too, until I realized how much waste there was.
67 tons of plutonium and 190 million liters of liquid radioactive waste stored in underground tanks
So, at $1000 or so a pound... well, you do the math.
Casual Games/Downloads
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.
Despite being toxic both chemically and because of its ionising radiation, plutonium is far from being 'the most toxic substance on earth' or so hazardous that 'a speck can kill'.
On both counts there are substances in daily use that, per unit of mass, have equal or greater chemical toxicity (arsenic, cyanide, caffeine) and radiotoxicity (smoke detectors).
more: http://www.uic.com.au/nip18.htm
I don't live anywhere near there.
The first rocket that explodes on launch will end this idea once and for all.
Powdered plutonium is a serious carcinogen. There were major worries when Cassini was launched, with a few kilos of the stuff and you're suggesting sending TONS up?
Yes, it *IS* a good idea, if we can guarantee 100% safety of the launch.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Or moon
where did my sig go? where's my sig at?
Beware the FUD that comes from articles like this. Last night on 60 minutes they ran an article about the Nevada Yucca mountain site. Totally one sided and full of FUD. At one point they interviewed a guy who said there would be 300 foot long tractor trailer trucks "the length of a football field" hauling this through people's neighborhoods. Last I checked, tractor trailers are 80 feet long. Just lots of sloppy reporting without proper fact checking.
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
Guys, this is a site that has spent most of its existance producing chemicals,etc.. weapons. This is not a nuclear power plant site. Please read the article and stop modding people as informative for saying nuclear power isn't clean the article is not about nuclear power.
No, this is
I'll admit, I only know a little about the storage of nuclear waste, but can someone PLEASE explain how it could possibly be so difficult to keep the stuff from leaking?
It's not like these containers are sitting outside exposed to the elements. They're, AFAIK, stored underground in secure facilities.
People make it sound like the government spends millions of dollars to develop these high-tech facilities and then just haphazardly sprays the stuff into old, rusty oil-drums. Surely this isn't the case.... right...?
-Grym
This entire article is based on a study by one person, no doubt with a political agenda.
I've lived next to Hanford since I was 3 years old, and work a couple of miles from the nuke plant. I've toured the site many times. I've followed local news, which reports on every boring little detail since they have nothing better to do, my entire life.
Are there problems? Sure. I remember when the single walled tanks started leaking, and they pumped everything into new double-wall tanks. Will there be problems in the future? Sure. Will those problems affect me? No. The accidents that take place may be major to the people working on that particular project, but are not catastrophic in the grand scheme of things.
Look: The Hanford site has been operational for decades. The number of serious accidents is tiny, and said accidents have only affected the workers directly involved with that given project, not the rest of us. Yes, there are environmental concerns. No, they aren't as horrible as this article makes them out to be. We swim in and eat fish from the river. Our water comes from the river and local groundwater. None is contaminated enough to be detectible, let alone harm somebody. And I'm right here, a fraction of a mile downstream from the site.
Even if the clean-up goes according to plan, Boldt claims there will still be 260 square kilometres of groundwater exceeding drinking water safety limits for over 10,000 years.
He's full of himself. This is nothing more than paranoid scare tactics.
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
How about a Space Elevator? It would still need an engine of some sort to get out of orbit, but that could be shipped up seperately.
If the space elevator fails, it would be unlikely to explode. Add a "recovery system" to the capsule that carries the radioactive material (think parachute), and potential problems would be very small.
Price could also be greatly decreased using a Space Elevator.
Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but copyright will always protect me.
However, he doesn't say what he wants. Does he want to delay the process, and why does he think that will lead to a better risk management than the current plant? Has he got any suggestions for how the risks can be mitigated?
IMHO, Alvarez comes across as a person that does not want this cleanup to take place at all because that may lead to nuclear power not becoming mainstream if an accident occurs during the cleanup.
Weren't we telling the nuclear power industry
The contamination isn't from nuclear power. It's from producing nuclear weapons, and general experiments. You must remember, a large amount of our nation's nuclear research was done at Hanford, including the world's first man-made, sustained nuclear reaction. The mess is from this activity, conducted decades ago when we didn't know as much as we do now.
This has nothing to do with nuclear power generation.
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
Let's say we ignore our current concerns with putting that stuff up in the air(cost and danger) and suppose we have found a safe and cheap method to get that to the sun, there is still something we must consider: Should we dispose of the material to a place where it can never be retrieved(the sun)? Its possible that we might find a way to refine or use the waste effectively 100 years from now but because we sent it away into the sun to be effectively destroyed, we no longer have that resource. Before we go tossing away our limited supply of resources we should at least consider this possibility.
I grew up in this town. Surprisingly, the population is incredibly pro nuke. The town is booming now, due to the fact there is so uch waste to clean up.
My high school mascot was a mushroom cloud.
I'd rather see it recycled. Some of this stuff can be fused to other materials and then used in personal power generation, medical imaging, industrial tools, sensor equipment, etc. That would be far safer than moving it all into one place where the sum radiation is impossible to shield against, and will cause a health hazard for the next 100-300 years.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Who says this waste is from nuclear power plants? It could be leftovers from nuclear weapons/research.
Also, nuclear power plant technology has vastly improved since this particlar waste repository was first opened up.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Yeah, there's that, and the fact that a modern nuke plant produces less hard radioactive waste in a year than a coal-burning plant spews (even past modern scrubbers) into the air every year.
We need to stop grandfathering in old power plants of all types, step up, pay some of the up-front costs, and get some good power generation going.
For the NIMBY folks, I'll volunteer to host a PBR in my backyard.
Contrary to what a lot of places would have you believe, if we'd actually shell out some cash and stop only focusing on the very bottom line for hte first year, we've got affordable, safe, and clean nuke power available to us... and it's a shame we've not made use of it.
to grandparent poster: don't be sad you live in WA, I left 11 years ago now, and I go back every chance I get... it only goes downhill from there.
I assert that my comment is only my opinion, not that of any employer, past, present or future.
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!"
Powdered plutonium is a serious carcinogen. There were major worries when Cassini was launched, with a few kilos of the stuff and you're suggesting sending TONS up?
So don't powder the stuff - armored radioisotope generators are a solved problem.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I live right next to the Idaho National Engineering lab. (INEL) we have 53 reacotrs out there, among them were the first to produce electric power, and the first breeder (plutonium producing) reactor. There is also one other interesting piece of tech out there- a calciner. This calciner takes liquid waste and makes it a solid. Litle balls about the size of cookie sprinkles. The stuff is still radioactive (no fix for that) BUT it can no longer seep inot groundwater, it no longer eats away at its container, it is much more stable with regard to the environment. Hanford has to know about this and I imagine they didn't do it because it would be a major pain to get the stuff here to calcine it, or it was expensive. (Most likly both transporting "hot" nuclear materials is probably the biggest paperwork nightmare I can imagine. one last point- the people who work there don;t want to die anymore than you do. These people know what they are doing- (but managment is the one that makes the papers.) And even if their managment tells them to do something stupid- the guy on the ground wants to go home to his family tonight. I serously doubt there will be a problem- I have lived here my whole life without problem, and plan to stay.
Radioactive materials are sometimes called "hot"; they can be warm to the touch; this comes from the fact that as decay occurs particles come shooting out of the nucleus. These particles can hit other nuclei and jostle molecules around.
IIRC, the most recent containment technology is based on storing the "waste" in crystals, eg Zircon. The upswing of crystal storage is that the "hot" material in the center of the crystal degrades the inner part of the crystal, which reacts by forming a "wall" instead of cracking or oozing. Kind of like when you crumple a piece of paper, and there's a limit to how much smaller you can make it by squeezing. Okay, maybe that's a poor analogy, since the "squeezing" comes from the inside, but you get the idea.
Here's a link.
FWIW, if we had a space elevator, would anyone object to putting nuclear plants on it? It's not in anyone's backyard, and it's well placed to sling the crud into space... if we can find a target. I say Mercury.
Nuclear is one option we should pursue. We should also keep working on bio-fuelcells and wind/wave. It all comes from the sun (well, A sun...) anyway. This is all going to be moot once we bootstrap a stellar economy.. there's more methane and natural gas to be had than well, even humans could waste (okay, maybe not, but there's a lot).
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
What exactly is a "Troll", now, on Slashdot? The parent post points out that Americans, including the people in Hanford, were told lies about the safety of the plant for decades. It gets a "Troll" mod, but no replies contradicting it. How appropriate for a story about silent complicity in nuclear pollution.
--
make install -not war
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.
Anti Nuke groups actually love this situation because it insures to keep the crisis mounting, and discourages any future nuclear development. Then if and when a nuclear waste incident occurs they can point and say "I told you so."
Why not go for better storage now, and keep looking for storage/disposal/reprocessing solutions to use later?
Letter To Iran
...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...
First, there's cost. Getting a payload to geosynchronous orbit will cost you about $5,000 to $10,000 a pound. That's NOT the sun. And you CAN'T just 'push it toward the sun' and expect it to get there. Remember, we're orbiting the sun at a pretty good clip. The energy required to cancel that velocity and drop a payload into the sun is something like 18 times what's required to put it in Earth orbit.
And of course there's the issue of launch failure. Current failure rates are around 5% to 20% for expendable launch vehicles (depending partly on what you're counting as a failure), and for our safest manned vehicles, around 2%.
Of course, it'd be just stupid to throw away perfectly good plutonium, so we're probably talking about lots of bulky contaminated secondary waste anyway. Really, it's a whole lot safer, cheaper, and more practical to bury the stuff under a mountain in Nevada than to try to shoot it into space.
In addition, just getting it into space isn't solely the answer to the waste problem. How much would it suck to try to colonize say, the moon 150 years from now, only to find it's logistically impossible because the surface is covered in radioactive sludge? So I'm saying, let's fire that stuff at Mercury. It's not really habitable near term, so no loss there. An even better way (in my non-solar scientist opinion) would be to lob it toward the sun, on a trajectory that would see it vaporized on the far side or even better, at a pole, so the vaporized waste gets blown out of our solar system.
My point was that we could build the reactors themselves in space, thus mediating the danger of polluting our ecosystem.
A boy can dream, anyway.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
Check out this URL regarding releases of gasses from Hanford in the 1945-1972 timeframe. http://www.doh.wa.gov/hanford/publications/history /release.html
Most of my family lived 50 miles away in Yakima at the time. They did the same experiment in Oak Ridge in Tennessee, at about the same time.Really! You asked"What could be better for wildlife and the environment?"
I'm not really anit-nuke but I thought the answer was pretty obvious;)
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
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.
One way to accelerate the solution to a problem is just to redefine it. Here's one such bright idea, hatched by the DOE: "If we reclassify some of the waste to a lower-level category, we don't need to clean it up. We can just cover it with grout and leave it." Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Washington State) has a lengthy discussion of this here. Sen. Cantwell's efforts to short circuit this nonsense may have paid off, as this subsequent statement seems to indicate.
I was hoping that my sarcasm was showing :-P
As others have noted the author doesn't offer an alternative. We can debate the issues surrounding the purpose of the plant or nuclear power ad nauseum but the fact remains we still have to deal with it. It appears to me that the objective of the article is ratcheting up rhetoric on the subject without adding any value to the topic.
It is important to realize some facts about the Hanford clean-up:
First, the problems they are talking about happened very early in nuclear power plant research, in the 50s and earlier. They are not so sloppy now in the storage of nuclear waste. Back then, they made extremely severe problems for themselves, which are very difficult to correct.
Second, there is a huge amount of government fraud, apparently. My uncle was the head of one of the groups at Battelle studying the problems. The way they talk now about the cleanup is exactly the way they were talking in the 70s. Apparently nothing has been done, but they continue to milk the issue for money.
There are tanks at the Hanford site that constantly boil, and have boiled for more than 40 years, because of the heat from radioactivity. They have made devices to examine the boiling. Back in the late 60s they decided they would try to stabilize the tanks by "glassifying" them. The wanted to turn the entire radioactive mass inside a tank into a solid mass of glass.
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.
What is apparently happening in this story is that they are trying to scare the public so that they can get even more money.
Here's more about U.S. government corruption: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government.
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.
SILENCE BLATHERING TOADIES! We are your new masters.
Hydroelectricity used to be the environmentalists' power of choice. Now, however, from an environmental standpoint, it is hated. Hydro power devastates river ecosystems (in addition to increasing evaporation, reducing freshwater supplies).
Besides, most of our power isn't hydroelectric. It's coal. How often do people die of coal pollution? On average, once every 22 minutes (24k/yr).
SILENCE BLATHERING TOADIES! We are your new masters.
Rocky Flats is the factory north of Denver where nuclear bombs were assembled until 1992. It is 12 years into the 14 year cleanup plan, and there hasnt been a major accident yet. The place will revert to a wildlife preserve (e.g. three-eye frogs). There was lots of doom-and-gloom too when evaluating its cleanup plan.
The operation at Hanford, and much of the early U.S. nuclear weapons program, was run on a "War Emergency" basis. That means that production was considered critical to the national security of the United States. If the plant was producing too much radioactive waste, or had other problems, too bad, we'll deal with it later. If we didn't produce enough nuclear weapons to counter Soviet aggression and expansionism, pollution was going to be the least of our problems.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Let's take California. Look at the number of hydroelectric. Look at the number of wind. How many nuclear? Hard to tell on that map. Just two. Two. Two nuclear plants supply about 20% of all electricity to the state. Two nuclear plants have had less impact on the environment than all other forms of mass electricity production in the state.
And for the record, it is possible to reduce waste dramatically. This can be done with breeder-burner reactors. My personal favorites are IFR/AFR designs. Breeder-burners process the long-lived waste into shorter-lived isotopes while producing electricity.
Now then, on to your other points one by one:
No, not all residents. There are many who aren't in opposition to the internment of the waste.
Questions for you: Do you believe that the current storage pools are safer than Yucca Mountain? Do you have an answer for the existing waste that doesn't involve Yucca? If a method could be found to greatly reduce the volume and threat of existing nuclear waste, wouldn't you be in favor of it?
Breeder-burners can use the spent fuel currently sitting idle in storage pools as well as weapons material that awaits decommissioning. I am against using Yucca for long-term storage but not for the same reasons as you I think. I think Yucca should be a short-term waystation to get the material out of storage pools until breeder-burners are online. My personal favorite is the IRF/AFR model.
And how many accidents have there been? In France where the vast majority of the electricity comes from nuclear power, how many terrorist attacks have succeeded against the rail and trucks that have criss-crossed that nation for decades? What terrorist opportunities? Please enumerate them.
You mentioned hydroelectric. Look back at that energy map of California. What do you think would happen if terrorists attacked those dams, flooding the valleys in front of them, drowning the residents, and washing away homes, businesses, and communities? Or did you think hydroelectric was warm and fuzzy since you can't get thyroid cancer from it?
Yes, it's a loose definition. That's what large-scale electricity generation entails. No form, not green, not nuclear, not fossil fuel-based is 100% safe when producing large amounts of energy on a municipal level.
You're right. It's hard to be safer than an alternative that can't run at the same capacity. 104 nuclear facilities are licensed in the US -- many of them share a physical location. Only 102 of them are actually running. 20% of all US electricity comes from nuclear. How many nuclear accidents have occurred in US history? Now look at the number of injuries and fatalities both of workers and people in
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
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.
Last I checked, the DoE ran the Pantex nuclear weapons plant. The same site with some obscene safety issues. Accidentally drilling into the core of a nuclear device resulted in the evacuation of the entire plant. Securing a warhead with duct tape increased the chances of a flat out nuclear explosion. And that's ignoring the clichéd "OMG THREE MILE ISLAND" commentary.
+++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!+++
Perhaps you reached this conclusion because the security teams were cheating during their security drills ? Cheating. for twenty years. It's not too hard to look impenetrable when you know the exact building and wall where an attack will take place. A DoE whistleblower admitted to a 50% success rate for security tests. Special forces teams were able to penetrate Los Alamos and wander off with enough material to create a nuclear bomb. Even an freakin' journalist was able to sneak into Los Alamos. There are plenty of other issues raised over at the Project On Governmental Oversight. Again, that's ignoring all the major security issues with CREM's going on over the last month.
Now, you're absolutely right in the fact that we need to get that waste cleaned up. But thinking that the DoE, NNSA, or the US government on the whole is "more than capable" is bullshit. We're flirting with disaster. If we take the outlook that everything is fine and dandy, we're going to quickly hit the point where someone will cause a situation of calamatious proportions.
--LordPixie
Ryan, I was told exactly the same thing in the early 70s. At that time they were planning on doing the glassification inside each tank. Something is very wrong, I think. It sounds like a huge boondoggle, at minimum.
I heard a talk by a former professor who had worked on the Hanford situation. He mostly talked about the underground storage tanks.
For starters, the records are horrible. Nobody really knows what was put in those tanks.
Second - some of the waste is fairly dilute, making it much more economical to try to concentrate it before treating it (low-level waste might be stored onsite for a decade to decay it and then just dumped safely in the river or otherwise treated as non-radioactive chemical waste).
Third - little has been done to effectively study it. Lots of studies have been done, but they've all had design problems - like poor controls or no controls. Probably just an excuse to spend money.
Basically, the whole mess is a boondoggle. And who wants to actually clean it up? That means doing something. If you do something and it goes wrong, somebody gets fired - usually the guy in charge. On the other hand, if you do nothing we practically guarantee an environmental disaster - but probably not until after the guy in charge has retired. Which route would you take if you were in charge?
Congress just needs to clean house. Good luck seeing it happen though. Maybe if we have a Chernobyl of our own...
People living near Hanford are already living on borrowed time.
An environmental engineer friend of mine, Larry Cornett noticed back in 1994 during a routine survey that the temperatures and radiation levels from the nuclear waste containers at Hanford were unusually high and getting higher due to what he later discovered was the unforseen effect of the precipitation of radioactive waste in the containers (as the radioactive clumps grow bigger, they generate more heat and radiation). In his urgent report to the Department of Energy, he projected that there would be a 95+% chance of heat explosion and catastrophic release of radiation within 10 years due to the precipitation of the waste in the containers, unless action was taken.
Larry's report (which I believe he links to on his website) contains the details, but the steam jets from such a "conventional" heat/pressure explosion (which could cause many other containers already under stress to explode) would kill just about all life for miles around Hanford, and spread dangerous levels of radiation into the ecosystem for at least tens of miles around (and once radioactive waste was loose in the ecosystem, nobody knows for certain how far it would spread or how many millions of people it would affect). As you might guess, Larry was fired for his trouble and his report suppressed. According to Larry, as recently as 5 years ago the instictive reaction of the DOE was to bury a problem instead of deal with it, which I think you all should find terrifying, especially those of you in Washington State!
After a multi-year legal battle depicted on his link and in the newspaper articles he links to, Larry got his back pay and pension on whistle-blower protections and the DOE temporarily fixed the problem by diluting the waste further across more containers and installing automated stirrers in the new containers to keep the waste from precipitating, but when I talked to him a few years ago Larry thought that would only buy Hanford another 20 years or so before an explosion was 95+% likely, apparently not enough time for the DOE to evacuate the waste to Nevada...
The production and extraction of plutonium uses a very different type of reactor than the Pressurized Water Reactors that are used for power generation in much of the world. A lot of the waste at Hanford isn't due to the reactor operation per se, but rather the chemical extractions that are necessary to recover the plutonium. These extractive processes generate a lot of waste chemicals (like acids that have been used to dissolve fuel) that are contaminated with hot particles. That's the origin of the liquid radioactive waste at Hanford.
Waste from a PWR is solid and it predominantly consists of used or burned fuel assemblies that are still radioactive but no longer capable of producing electricity efficiently. The fuel assemblies contain the fuel rods which encapsulate the fuel pellets and the daughter products of the fission reaction (various isotopes of noble gases trapped in the fuel rods).
The mass of waste produced by a nuclear plant in a given year of operation is miniscule compared to the thousands of tons of ash, soot, and greenhouse gases emitted by your typical coal plant with a similar electrical output.
The Hanford wastes are composed of the byproducts of reprocessing, including organic solvents which were used to do solvent separations of U, Pu and fission products. The concentration of these products is very low vis a vis ceramic fuel pellets so the volumes are comparatively huge, and the solubility/mobility is immensely greater.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
How is the real cost of energy calculated? Think about it. When people are paying 7-12 cents per kilowatt hour, does the price include this 50 billion dollar clean up? Of course it doesn't.
Take Canada for example...
Nuclear energy subsidies from 1953 to 2001 were approximately 16.6 billion. Total loans written off to the fossil fuel industry were another $2.8 billion since 1970. Cleaning up old radioactive waste and decommissioning uranium tailings added another $850 million. This totals$20.25 billion just on nuclear subsidies and clean up costs and fossil fuel forgiven loans. If this $20.25 had been poured into wind energy programs, and R&D to new technologies, it might be powering 4.5 million homes today. And keep in mind that fossil fuel plants would still have the cost of fuel.
Another thing that most people do not realise is that large scale solar power generation is not about a whole lot of silicon cells in a paddock, it's about doing things with heat.
Oil crises and droughts show us that it is best that there is not one single method of power generation. Control systems have improved, which makes options like wind more attractive, especially for things like peak load power. In some parts of the world it could probaly be considered for base load power, but most places don't have reliable enough wind. They are made of silicon, copper and sometimes aluminium - how can anyone sanely compare this to nuclear waste? Is this what happens when the "all chemicals are bad" philosophy hits the "nuclear is warm fuzzy and cuddly" philosopy? Go beyond the advertisments and sound bites, there are a lot of information out there starting with basic chemistry and physics texts. Our current level of technology is built on a huge number of things that you would not want an infant putting in their mouth, which is fine, but the nuclear power industry alone portrays their dangerous goods as "clean".