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."

Comments

Fscking Congress (YES this is a rant)

[DoofusOfDeath]

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.

Re:Fscking Congress (YES this is a rant)

[benhocking]

1. On March 6, 2006, the Republicans were still in charge of Congress.
2. How would Congress know if information was being kept from them? (Perhaps I'm missing something here.)

Not that I dispute your overall point that Congress could do even more oversight than they're already employing. You should note, however, how many pundits keep bemoaning this oversight as "witch hunts" or "fishing expeditions".

Re:Oh Please

[nonsequitor]

We're supposed to be outraged, because we can't see the documents about an accident that *almost* happened?

The chain reaction *almost* happened, a spill of highly enriched uranium in solution *DID* happen. The fact that this involves the safety records of a major DoD supplier being hidden from congress is troubling. This prevented congress from taking actions like mandating increased at the facility. You better believe that a solution of highly enriched uranium is a carcinogen, if that stuff were to be spilled more often or even to pollute the water table *AND* the company knew it had happened, then still nobody else would know. This is not about the next Chernobyl, think Simpsons Movie.

Re:Duh

[Jedi Alec]

Decide you're perfectly capable of blowing yourselves up and retire? Win-win!

Sad Times are these...

[Mateo_LeFou]

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.

This seems a little overblown.

[raehl]

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.

Re:This seems a little overblown.

[afidel]

You act like classifying information is something new for this administration. They have gone back and reclassified millions of pages of previously open material without review. The VP had his own "top secret" logo stamp created that carried no weight and would be illegal under the open records act.

Chain reaction? I'm skeptical

[MobyDisk]

The commission said there were two areas, the glovebox and an old elevator shaft, where the solution potentially could have collected in such a way to cause an uncontrolled nuclear reaction. I am not a physicist, but I don't think that packing enriched uranium into a glovebox could cause a nuclear reaction. With the elevator shaft -- are they imagining something crushing the uranium under great pressure? Is that enough? This sounds very unlikely to me. Nuclear material isn't "explosive" in the typical sense. Can someone qualified chime-in on this?

While I'm for oversight, what would Congress do?

[xC0000005]

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.

"Almost" a chain reaction ?

[Ollabelle]

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.

Re:Oh Please

[sumdumass]

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.

This is why there are legitimate concerns

[cliffski]

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.

Re:It is NOT that they were trying to hide it

[WillAffleckUW]

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.