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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."
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.
Unfortunately, I can't tell if you're being serious. If so, how would terrorists benefit from knowing, after the fact, that we had a nuclear accident? If you're being serious (and I hope you're not) this sounds a lot to me like "OMG! Think of the terrorists!"
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
...where Homer falls asleep at the control panel:
FTA:
The leak was discovered when a supervisor saw a yellow liquid ``running into a hallway'' from under a door, according to one document.
Information wants to be Free. Useful Information will cost you.
if its anything like this one, we wouldn't be left in the dark...
We'd glow in it.
34486853790
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Decide you're perfectly capable of blowing yourselves up and retire? Win-win!
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
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
"The leak was discovered when a supervisor saw a yellow liquid ``running into a hallway'' from under a door, according to one document."
Highly Enriched Uranium or Godzilla's Urine?!?!? You be the judge.
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
Only actual chain reactions need be disclosed and the mushroom cloud should serve as public notice. Anything more would be a waste of taxpayer dollars.
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
In the mad rush to privatize government, the broader issue of a serious lack of oversight will become quite common.
0 6/murphy200706
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
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.
Any container designed to hold enriched uranium would be carefully shaped so as to avoid coming anywhere near to creating a critical mass. In this incident, the risk was that the liquid would flow into the elevator shaft, where it would pool into a compact shape that could create a critical mass.
It wouldn't have caused an explosion, just a chain reaction a la what is sustained in a nuclear reactor - except this would be completely uncontrolled and unshielded. As everyone here probably knows, fission is caused by one neutron busting apart a big nucleus, throwing out more neutrons (among other things). Criticality happens when there are more neutrons in a given "generation" (instant, essentially) than the previous generation (for a given geometry, etc). In a power reactor this ratio of neutrons in a given instant to the previous instant (k) is (very close to) 1 - ie the neutron flux remains (relatively) stable across short time frames (the flux varies significantly with fuel burnup). Once you go to k > 1, the reaction increases very rapidly and thats when things get dangerous in an uncontrolled environment. There would be "nuclear reactions", even fission, going on in a tablespoon of the stuff, just not at a rate necessary to create a chain reaction and establish criticality. How much of this stuff it would take to create and maintain a chain reaction depends on a lot of things - geometry, what else is in the liquid solution (ie anything hydrogenous would help thermalize/"slow-down" the neutrons to the point where fission is most likely, maintaining the chain reaction), and the amount of enrichment (since this is weapons/navy grade stuff, it was extremely high, meaning you wouldn't need much). That said, I don't have a good estimate of how much of this stuff it would take, but I do know that a sphere of pure Pu-239 a little bigger than a softball (~12kg) is a critical configuration. I have a BS in Nuke Engineering, but haven't had a reactor theory course for a few years and shifted career paths, so I apologize for any errors.
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.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Actually, the "spill" makes it more likely, not less likely.
Fissionables in solution are tricky things to deal with. Consider the following four cases:
1) Homer Simpson drops a subcritical hunk of a water-soluble U235 salt into a swimming pool. No big deal. It's a single subcritical mass of U235, and the neutrons fly straight out of it and into the surrounding water, and not enough bounce back into the mass to present a problem. Homer reaches in with a net, and pulls the chunk of salt out of the net. "No problemo."
2) A little while later, as the harmless chunk dissolves into the huge pool, there will be localized spots near the chunk, with both sufficiently-high concentration of fissionable materials and the right amount of moderating material between them for a criticality incident. "D'OH!"
3) "Aha! I'm smart! I'll prevent that scenario by dissolving it, a bit at a time, by adding it to the pool by using a salt shaker near the pump intake!" Congrats! The U235 atoms are, at all times, sufficiently widely-dispersed, that there is no criticality risk. "Woohoo!"
4) A few weeks after your swim, the place is shut down and everyone gets fired. The maintenance guy forgets to drain the pool. The water gradually evaporates, and concentrations in the remaining water begin to rise... and a few years later, some guy spraying graffiti by the abandoned poolhouse wonders WTF that blue flash was. "D'OH!" again.
I'm on a roll here, so I may as well close off the "security by obscurity" issue. There are places where security by obscurity works, and this is one of them.
The deal here is that criticality incidents, especially involving fissionables in solution are a function of degree of enrichment (in the case of uranium as the solute), nuclear properties of the solvent, local concentrations of the ions in solution, and a whole boatload of other things, in order to build cool toys, you often have to deal with them all, simultaneously. I'm not in the building-of-cool-toys industry, and have mercifully I've never had a need to know.
Some of these things are public domain, but others (particularly those things pertaining to the design of shipborne Naval reactors, which use HEU because there simply isn't enough space on all types of ships to permit the use of LEU-based designs) are classified. Given a description of an incident, however, it may be possible to place upper and lower bounds on some of the classified parameters - bounds that are narrower than the published numbers, and there are plenty of adversaries who would be delighted to deduce things about our Naval capabilities (a lot more interesting/useful than even our bomb designs), given just a few more missing puzzle pieces. The math is hard, and denying adversaries the pieces of the puzzle that they can use to derive the whole picture isn't security by obscurity, it's just good security practice.
The magic depends on how you pronounce the word "nuclear". If you pronounce it "New Cle Ur", it is very frightening and you are likely a mad scientist or hippie liberal. Then it's a black magic word. But, if you pronounce it "New Kuh Ler", you are a down-home, folksy kind of guy and people like you and will believe what you say. Then it becomes a white magic word.
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! --
Keep in mind that this event's worst case result from this would have been:
e gs/staff/sr0090/v29/sr0090v29.pdf
"If a criticality accident had occurred in the filter glovebox or the elevator pit, it is
likely that at least one worker would have received an exposure high enough to cause acute
health effects or death." Keep in mind that the result of the second worst event for nuclear facilities for the year. Compare that with the coal industry or oil industry where there are multiple deaths annually.
Also this is fairly old news since it was in the NRC's "Report to Congress on Abnormal Occurrences - Fiscal Year 2006 (NUREG-0090, Vol. 29)". Which has a release date of April 2007. Take a look for yourself its on page 14
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/nur
The information is available to congress is not notified everytime an incident occurs. Unless the accident could cause things to happen off site the public isn't notified until the annual list of inccidents, primarily because it would just create unneeded hystaria as seen by this FUD while the engineers review the facts and figure out REALLY happened. As far as the company trying to hide it. If it is not reported to the NRC within 24 hours of the event they would likely lose their license.
(It is also worth noting that the Lib Dems control a very large number of local authorities. Pissing them off can therefore have interesting consequences. It would be most unfortunate if a new sewer had to be installed in the road... right outside an MP's house... Terrible... Don't know how that could have happened...)
Both the opposition and the third party have other weapons that do not exist in America. Either can call for a motion of no confidence, in which the Prime Minister MUST appear to answer questions. As indeed they must for Parliamentary Question Time. Although it has not been used this way for years, it used to be standard practice to use no confidence motions to force the other party to turn up for important debates, as the Prime Minister must resign if the motion passes. It is vital to that party that it can guarantee as large a majority as possible. Question Time is also important, as it creates a much greater sense of accountability. It's not perfect, but it gets better answers than subpoenas seem to be in America.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
No. lol..No, no no.
When did he say nothing? They did the paperwork and followed the reporting processes, it was a change in how the paperwork was classified that caused the silence. This change was unrelated to the accident and happened before the accident.
And for the record, omitting a fact is only a lie when you do so to represent the situation as something it wasn't. Not saying anything at all is an omission and certainly not a lie. I cannot understand how you could place that definition together under the reported circumstances without malice underlying the intent. The world would be a lot better if people like you would just go away. It isn't likely that you will so at least make sure your shit is together when you attempt to snowball someone. Your on the Internet with people who even though they might not be as smart as you think you are, they have all the reference tools to determine if you are. Keep this in mind and don't expect to be able to make stuff up to support your twisted view like you might do with your friends who are too lazy to verify something. The geek by default knows where to look and has proved they will look.
Oh Please for sure.
We are supposed to believe that 9 gallons of enriched Uranium won't go into chain reaction but if you spill it onto a floor where it spreads out the chances of a chain reaction increases?
when Pigs fly.
Check out the Barns radius.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Nothing glowing in the dark to see here. Move along.
Have gnu, will travel.
Burning coal does. Every year American plants pump 96,000 pounds of mercury into the air.
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The containers are usually barrels. The important consideration here is the total mass of the material stored. US facilities usually store the Uranium/Plutonium/Thorium/etc as disolved salts. The whole suspension is then labeled as radioactive waste, but the total mass of the material is fairly low. If the concentration gets too high, considerable heat can be generated. That has happened at some US plants in the past. The solution is to limit the volume stored in any one container. If you don't plan to ever use it for anything, a little boron helps too. To get a chain reaction, you need to moderate the reaction somehow. The neutrons have specific energy bands (read temperatures) where they are absorbed by the tartet neuclei When emitted, they have too high an energy. (Un)Fortunatly, the hydrogen in the water is a moderator, so it CAN work. The next requriement is to concentrate the solution, to increase the mass of the reactant. You need something that is the exact opposit of the puddle on the floor. That spreads (thins) the reactant out, reducing any ability to sustain a chain reaction. A mop bucket would work better. A lot of the posts above were positing a 'blue flash' you won't see one of those unless you are getting close to a bomb type of reaction. If you do see one, you are already dead. The blue is secondary radiation. To get enough to see in a lit room, you have to be way over the amount of hard radiation that would kill you. You probably have around enough time to arrange your funeral. Say a couple of days. Don't count on being able to do anything on the last day, though.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
"Convicted of a crime I didn't even commit. Hah! Attempted murder? Now honestly, what is that? Do they give a Nobel prize for attempted chemistry?"
We are supposed to believe that 9 gallons of enriched Uranium won't go into chain reaction but if you spill it onto a floor where it spreads out the chances of a chain reaction increases?
No, we're supposed to believe that an improperly sealed transfer line could allow sufficent uranium to accumulate in two possible places over the course of multiple transfer operations.
Report PDF
-- 3 events that reshaped the world in the 20th century: WW1, WW2, and WWW
No, you're just a typical Republican apologist - even though I'm not a Democrat. Democrats, BTW, did not appear in my post at all, but are all you can whine about - even though it's Republicans who are hiding the facts about this nuclear spill that their administration, and its crony contracts, produced.
First you kick off a rant with some Republican denial projection, that "Democrats are detached from reality" (complete with a stupid Republican slander word). Then you wallow in some extreme strawman you made up that reveals what is in your mind - but claim someone actually accused you of it; more denial projection. You get to jerk off to your sick fantasies while blaming them on someone else.
Then you quote Lenin, and say "so what are you going to do about it?"
What I'm doing is easily exposing your insanity. In public, where others can easily see how far gone you are. You are a lost cause, since you're still hiding in your faithy Republican worship after all everyone has seen. But you're such a good example of Republican character defects that parading you in public is worth the distasteful time spent prodding you into your distinctive screech. Because not just the pure politics that is your sole obsession is at stake. As we're discussing, your Republicans are so demented that when your crony contractors spill nuclear material and lie about it, somehow Democrats are at fault.
--
make install -not war
Chernobyl had a lot more mass of fuel, already hot, contained in a pressurized vessel. When the reaction got out of hand, it superheated the water causing a steam explosion that blew the top off the vessel, spewing part of the reactor contents into the air and also causing a graphite fire that released even more radioactive material. Since the fuel was in solid form, the bulk of it was not easily mobile, allowing it to stay at a critical mass and density while it heated to a lava-like state and melted it's way downward into the ground while keeping the graphite fire burning.
This incident involved 9 gallons uranium and an unspecified solvent at an unspecified concentration and occurred at a processing plant, not a reactor. Had a critical mass pooled, it would have started heating up as the reaction rate increased. This would have caused the solvent to boil, mobilizing some of the radioactive particles but keeping the pool somewhat dispersed, in turn reducing the reaction rate...a sort of natural moderation effect. Actually, this is pretty much the main challenge to overcome in detonating a fission bomb. They like to sputter themselves apart before you get an effective yield.
Because of the self-moderating effect and the lack of any way to build up pressure, there could be no explosion from this spill. It might start a fire, however, which could be expected to increase the amount that becomes airborne, and of course cause additional hazards if the fire spread. A fire can be fought, by the way, although you want to take extra care not to spread the uranium to places where it's harder to clean up.
The increased radiation and perhaps irradiation from the reaction would be a hazard to anyone working in the immediate area. The NRC said there was a possibility of one worker receiving a fatal dose of radiation had it gone critical. The actual uranium that might become airborne is a surprisingly minor hazard. In fact, the wikipedia article has a picture of someone holding U-235 pellets in their hand. It is highly toxic and this is the main threat, but you still need to get a sufficient dose to cause problems. Its radioactivity is actually very low when not in a chain reaction, with a half life of 700 million years. The bigger concern is the daughter isotopes created by its decay with shorter half lives, like radon, but these of course only form at the rate the uranium decays, so it's typically only a problem with very large deposits.
Also, if you read the article in full, you will see that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission already did an investigation (part of what was classified) and gave the company a list of required operational changes to help prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future and mitigate damage if it does.