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.
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.
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 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.
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
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!"
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
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.
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.
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.