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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.
...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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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
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.
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.