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Nuclear Info Kept From Congress and the Public
Thermite writes "On March 6, 2006 an accident occurred at Nuclear Fuel Services in Erwin, Tennessee. According to reports, almost 9 gallons of highly enriched uranium in solution spilled and nearly went into a chain reaction. Before the accident in 2004, the NRC and The Office of Naval Reactors had changed the terms of the company's license so that any correspondence with Nuclear Fuel Services would be marked 'official use only.' From the article: 'While reviewing the commission's public Web page in 2004, the Department of Energy's Office of Naval Reactors found what it considered protected information about Nuclear Fuel Service's work for the Navy. The commission responded by sealing every document related to Nuclear Fuel Services and BWX Technologies in Lynchburg, Va., the only two companies licensed by the agency to manufacture, possess and store highly enriched uranium.' The result was that the public and Congress were both left in the dark for 13 months regarding this accident and other issues at the facility."
because we can't see the documents about an accident that *almost* happened?
If they're hiding the little "oopsie"s, what about the accidents that did happen?
What're we supposed to do? Tell *everyone (including possibly terrorists and enemy combatants) about every little nuclear accident we ever have?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Congress' approval ratings are tied with the historical low. Do they even know why?
I'm a conservative and typically voted Republican, and even *I* wanted the Dems to come into power to repair the damage of Bush's administration. But on any issue involving something the DoD / DoE marks as classified, they just shrug and say, "Bush's people called it classified. I guess we can't exercise oversight after all."
I know this post will likely cost me some karma. I just wish I could spend *all* my karma on it and actually get my congressmen and senators to DO THEIR FSCKING JOBS and stop this crap.
"I think if we were to have an event like this again, we would push to make it public,"
And I think that this kind of ass-backwards thinking is exactly what's going to result in the next Chernobyl. How about instead of spending all your time on clean-up and PR, put a little foresight into the management of the damn facility.
"Clearly it would have been better to have this discussion 18 months ago than it is to have it now."
Clearly. Asshat.
Sad Times are these... when
1. passing ruffians can say `nee' at will to old women
2. the sarcasm in my post is not obvious as all hell.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
It does not appear that anyone's intent was to hide accidents - the original problem was that sensitive Navy information that shouldn't have been released was getting released, so instead of doing the narrow fix and just not releasing the sensitive documents, the (extremely through/lazy, you pick) step was taken and all the documents from the Navy fuel supply companies were restricted.
As an apparent unintended consequence (or a willfully accepted consequence) of the policy change to make sure that sensitive documents stopped ending u on websites, non-sensitive documents regarding safety incidents ended up being restricted as well.
But, even when the accident occurred, the regulatory commission apparently even made a point of having a special vote to make sure the party responsible for the incident was properly, and publicly, identified.
There is a definite difference between changing a policy to hide safety accidents and safety accidents not getting disclosed as well as a result of a policy change. The latter is the case here. The policy will be adjusted.
On the flip side, imagine the uproar if the policy had originally only specified that sensitive documents got restricted, and sensitive information was released anyway because someone mistakenly labeled a sensitive document as non-sensitive? It's a trade-off - and while the current policy made it harder for the public to find out about an accident, it's also true that a different policy would increase the risk of accidental release of sensitive material.
Either way, there's no reason to assign nefarious intent where apparently none is due.
paintball
Your average congressman/woman is not fit for the types of duties we already allow them - allocating money. Let's say this had all been open, and it was brought up before an oversight committe in Congress. What exactly is a congressman going to bring to the table at such a discussion?
CongressMan A: "I'm outraged at this. You stored Uranium in plain gray containers, spilled them, and then didn't buy cleanup services from my home state. What do you have to say for yourself?"
Uranium Dude: "We acknowledge that we were wrong to spill the uranium, and promise to paint the containers yellow, AND buy the yellow paint from your home state."
Congressman A: "That's damn right you will! Yellow paint and pork in one day. That's congressional leadership."
We need people with experience in handling such materials on the oversight committe - congresspeople can go off and write some vision law or national spotted insect day - in other words, what they are good at. And we need some sort of realistic expectations on what punishments would ever be meted out. I doubt we would ever ditch a uranium supplier because it's in our best interests for security to keep the number of entrants in the field small. And we wouldn't want disgruntled employees deciding to contract out.
www.voiceofthehive.com - Beekeeping and Honeybees for those who don't.
I'm sorry, but I missed something. If it's in the container, it's safe, but if it's loose on the floor, it's liable to start a chain reaction? That just doesn't sound right. I smell an ulterior motive in this story.
Ibid.
Uh, yes there is. He has already shown himself a liar, so I would say the likelyhood he would lie again, is pretty high. But I disagree with the notion that his actions would be evil. Such a spill would probably not be of much danger to the public anyway, and given the public outcry and scare whenever something happens that involves the magic word "nuclear", maybe it was even smart of him. Let's face it, this wasn't, and could never be, another Chernobyl.
Keeping the above in mind, it's not that unlikely that I would have lied too, had I been in his shoes.
A few years ago, I had a conversation about next generation energy with a friend (one of those "privatize everything" types). He lambasted people for fearing nuclear energy as he saw it as the way of the future. This story is *exactly* the argument I made to explain the legitimacy of public fears of nuclear power. We let the private industry in with it's self-serving interests and God forbid something goes wrong. Just like on Three Mile Island, private industry finds it in their interest to sweep problems under the rug to the detriment of the public good.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
For the record, I am a physicist.
A lot of nuclear materials can under-go a chain reaction if a significant mass is accumulated. It has to do with production versus escape of neutrons and scales as volume-to-area. So, if two sub-critical masses were combined, they could become critical. I am somewhat leary of a "spill" making something go critical, unless the mass was over-critical and the container provided some damping effect.
This isn't a situation where they hid the facts from congress. It is a situation where a paperwork processing change from before the incident cause the incident's paper work to go unnoticed by congress. The reporting became classified and out of direct sight.
I'm sure this can be fixed. It isn't like carelessness is rampant and they sought out to hide the incident.
I guess the big surprise here is that a company is able to change classifications of certain paperwork without talking to the agencies with oversight. It should be that the classifications should be mandated by a set of guidelines and maybe some notification system to oversight panels when something happens. The government agency automatically assume one thing and marked the reports classified where even if they should be classified, the people overseeing them should stil be aware of them.
about nuclear power. I'm opposed to it. not on any technical grounds, or any dogmatic or spiritual bollocks, just because I do NOT trust private companies with this stuff, nor do I trust them to handle GM food responsibly either. If we had decades of perfect safety records on existing reactors, combined with absolute transparency on what goes wrong and who is to blame and what happened if something does fail, then maybe I'd be convinced that this is a technology that you can trust private companies, or for that matter, the government, to use safely.
This is not currently the case. here in the UK, we even falsified documents to show the japanese we had carried out safety procedures on their reprocessed fuel. Not surprisingly, they sent it back.
The risk of nuclear accidents is VERY small, but the potential worst case effect of one if it does happen is massive. With other forms of power like tidal, solar, wind, the worst case scenarios tend to be very very benign. As a result, I'd rather we spent the same cash investing in those technologies than one with so many potential downsides, including the leak risk, the theoretical meltdown, the security risks, potential health problems, need for uranium, centralised nature of the technology, need to be near large supplies of water, yada yada yada...
nuclear is great in theory, so is GM, but in practice, I don't vaguely think we are there yet in terms of safety.
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Take off your tin foil hat.
For one thing, the comment of "nearly went into a chain reaction" is complete FUD. What is nearly? That does not even make sense. Anything done with nuclear fuel is done inside different levels of containment. Okay, maybe it spilled out of a storage container but it was contained in the handling room which has a special closed drainage system, non porous floors, and a ventilation system that is uses recirculated air that is monitored and filtered. For the purpose of FUD, everyone here would like to think two dudes in an old pickup truck went around a bend to fast on a dirt road and some of the "stuff" in that barrel spilled into old man Thompson's catfish pond. I am all for oversight with nuclear projects but I am not for the FUD that surrounds everything nuclear.
I was a nuclear operator and radiological controls maintenance supervisor in a past life. I've done my share of operating and cleaning the plants and their by products including an ion resin exchange replacement and a refueling.
I was taking a new person to the facility on a general tour of the area. He commented that he remembered his parents wearing gas masks and protesting a nuclear plant when he was a little kid and now here he is standing just outside the secondary shield looking at one. Things can go wrong and do go wrong but it is not the norm. TMI for example was a combination of about 6 different problems or errors and even still, the end results were minimal on the surrounding area and the general public.
How do you think we get the nuclear fissile material in the first place?
We mine it.
To mine it we release toxic chemicals into the environment, heavy metals that poison rivers, cause early deaths for mine workers, and release radon gas.
You need to look at nuclear from a total life perspective - from source (mining) to use (fission) to eventual neutrality (a few tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years).
In my state alone, many hundreds of people have died from this "cycle".
Stop trying to gin the numbers by restricting it to the input into the reactor to output from the reactor - this is a fraction of the total bykill.
Now, don't get me started on coal. And, in case you wondered, I've owned Peabody shares (IPO) so I am aware of the risk factors of that. People always underestimate the lethality of energy generation - I worked in power generation when I started my career, so I am keenly aware of who dies and from what. I have lived in mining towns. People have a way of hiding the truth from themselves about the impacts of their favority power source, to justify it in their minds. No matter WHAT it is.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Which sounds very reasonable, until you realize that the worst case scenario with a reactor (say, a Chernobyl style accident) happens every year with conventional technology. We would have to have a Chernobyl event annually to compete with the death and destruction caused by the coal industry.
The fact is that if you are serious about trying to solve our energy problems, there is ONE and ONLY ONE option available which does not require a technological breakthrough - and that is nuclear power.
Burning coal does. Every year American plants pump 96,000 pounds of mercury into the air.
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I just can't resist slapping you again, because you're like a Republican voodoo doll.
You are such an extremist that you think that just because you happen to be totally wrong, and I'm around to point it out, that somehow no one can be right about anything. You Republicans are so self absorbed, so schizophrenic, so caught up in your own self-serving delusions of persecution, that you will hide like cowards in any herd you hear referenced whenever any one of you gets called out individually.
So let's talk about your Republicans. I am not "demonizing" Republicans, nor just for affiliating with Republicans. I am just pointing out that Republicans don't trust members of Congress with the exact info that Congress is supposed to have in order to represent us as a republic, as I said in my original post. You Republicans "demonize" yourselves by acting like that: by voting in (twice) a tyrant like Bush who treats Congress, the superior in power of the two elected branches, like at best a nuisance, at worst calling them traitors. Even when it's a Republican Congress, those Republicans don't bother asking questions to keep themselves informed, because they are slaves to your Party. That is the sinister groupthink that is destroying the republic.
The kind of Republican groupthink that has rounded up people into Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and countless torture gulags across the world, without respect to their human rights - or respect for anything at all. You sick Republican fascists are running concentration camps for torture. You are using your power to demonize groups of people, round them up, torture and kill them.
That has reduced you Republicans to being evil - by your own actions, not just because people like me point you out.
And then you are so insane as to somehow accuse me of something like that. You are exactly the sick, evil bastard that you are describing in your insane, circular posts.
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make install -not war