Slashdot Mirror
NASA's Plan To Clean Up Space Program Launch Site Contamination
Elliot Chang tips a story about plans from NASA and the US Air Force to clean up the areas around the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, which have been contaminated with decades worth of carcinogenic chemicals from launching Shuttles, the Apollo moon missions, and other rockets. The KSC cleanup is expected to take 30 years, and will cost an estimated $96 million.
"By far, the most common contaminant is a chlorinated solvent called trichloroethylene, or 'trike,' and its breakdown products — substances known to cause birth defects and cancer and reaching concentrations thousands of times higher than federal drinking water standards allow. ... Kennedy's sandy, alkaline soils are thought to neutralize most metals and other contaminants before they become a problem up the food chain. But trike dies hard. And workers kept pouring it into the ground in the early years of the shuttle program, thinking it would evaporate."
From TFA:
"They advised users to pour the solvent on "dry sand, earth, or ashes at a safe distance from occupied areas" to promote evaporation."
Wouldn't pouring it on porous materials cause it to get absorbed and not promote evaporation at all?
Basic physics would imply that to promote evaporation you'd want as large a surface to air ratio as possible, or am I doing it wrong?
The way the $96M will break down:
1) Hire 150 people from the unemployment line
2) Purchase 150 white jumpsuits, boots and hardhats off Ebay
3) Purchase 150 rolls of Downy (The Quicker Picker Upper)
4) Announce clean-up effort to media who roll the vans
5) CNN is ablaze for a week with pics of clean-up efforts and dirty paper towel
6) Next week, all is forgotten
7) Split the $94M three ways with other vampires running the corporation
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
So the disposal method was, let it evaporate? Then instead of evaporating it in a metal pan, they poured it on the ground? WTF!?!
If I were an embittered cynic, I might be inclined to suggest that workers, under time and/or budget and/or managerial pressure, were really concerned with making the problem go away as quickly as possible, rather than making sure that the problem specifically evaporated away... Evaporation isn't all that fast, compared to absorption into a porous medium, and evaporation out of an impermeable vessel makes it really easy to see how much hasn't evaporated yet, while absorption makes it comparatively difficult to measure how much hasn't evaporated unless somebody specifically budgets for a bunch of test wells...
Or 0.5% of their $18B annual budget. But the $96M expenditures for KSC will be spread out over 30 years, so it's more like .02% of their annual budget. (though they estimate the agency-wide cleanup costs to be $1B, presumably also in a 30 year period.)
They form viscous toxic goo that will take $1 billion in cleanup costs agencywide over many decades, and could bog down funding for next-generation spacecraft.
NASA estimates it will spend $96 million in the next 30 years at Kennedy Space Center, including $6 million this year. The Air Force says it will take another $50 million to get the rest of its cleanups at Cape Canaveral under way by 2017.
Trichloroethylene was used for decades to decaffeinate coffee, among other uses, so it wasn't considered particularly dangerous until fairly recently.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
There is also the fact that the stuff was a solvent, so it was presumably used for cleaning/degreasing/etc. and thus would only be considered waste once it had acquired a load of assorted dissolved materials, many of them probably nasty, which wouldn't evaporate at all and would simply be left in the soil...
Only because the cost of making the mess is literally astronomical.
What you should really ask is, what was the (health) damage suffered before they cleaned it up. The statement that they poured this stuff into the environment in the "first years" suggests that it hasn't been cleaned up for at least 20 years even though everybody knew it wouldn't be going away.
interestingly it also attacks the ozone layer. win-win-win, pollutes ground, water and air! http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/tfacts70.pdf
Well, sometimes. Think of LA's smog problem, or the depletion of the ozone layer due to CFC's - dilution wasn't working too well. Putting laws on the books helped a lot though.
Another example is heavy metals put into the air by coal burning. It was diluted in the ground before, it's diluted in the air now. One is a lot better than the other.
About 25% die with cancer. Sure, chemicals play a role, but the true reason for such high cancer rates is that people don't usually die because of curable illnesses. And cancer is - so far - not curable. The more progress we have in curing other diseases, treating injuries and preventing accidents - the more cancer deaths there will be, it's unavoidable.
Someone having cancer after being contaminated with some chemical is *not* proof of the cancer being caused by the chemical. The normal rate of cancer is just too high to proof even the effect of highly carcinogenic substances this way.
when I was in the navy we practically bathed in the stuff. I had a friend hack off the end of his finger when we were in port one time and they took him to a hospital off the boat. A nurse was trying to get his hand clean so the doctor could stitch it up and was having a hard time. She asked, "How do you get this stuff off your hands?" His answer was, "You don't want to know."
Every year we had to fill out forms listing all the toxic stuff we'd been exposed to during the course of our work - trichlor was one of many.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
On one of MIT Open Course lectures, http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-885j-aircraft-systems-engineering-fall-2005/lecture-notes/lecture-2/ where Aaron Cohen (orbiter project manager in 1972) discussed history of the Space Shuttle, professor Jeff Hoffman said on one launch with family members 3 miles from launch pad had to get in the busses to leave the area 5 minutes after launch. Hoffman's brother was a "space nut" and wanted to watch the vehicle go over the horizon (and he was not happy about leaving early). Reason they moved everyone because afternoon launch had smoke from the SRBs drifting toward the viewing site. There's all kinds of nasty stuff and they didn't want people to get exposed to the smoke.
Thanks to Tekfactory for bringing these MIT courses to my attention.
mfwright@batnet.com
Well, the article persists in saying 'trichlorethylene', which is substantially slower to evaporate than trichloroethane (aka 1,1,1 trichloroethane). Also less toxic, and less of everything, mostly.
NASA published this report on 'inhibited 1,1,1 trichloroethane', replacing trichlorethylene, but I recall in the 90s that Tri-Ethane was essentially banned from common uses, thanks Montreal.
Apparently, the 'inhibited' part of Tri-Ethane is the addition of dioxane, amyl alcohol, or nitromethane, and butylene oxide. Doesn't that sound yummy.
Working on typewriters, IBM delivered it as 'Tri-Ethane', "1,1,1 trichloroethane", and I could find the part number for you in a week or so... It even cleaned your clothes. Good stuff, that.
Calling it Methyl Chloroform does diminish the appeal, I admit.
We won't even get into MEK. That stuff is the printer's friend, and just plain nasty.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
So the disposal method was, let it evaporate? Then instead of evaporating it in a metal pan, they poured it on the ground?
WTF!?!
This was standard practice almost everywhere prior to environmental regulations being enacted. And not just for TCE. The U.S. Government is paying for contamination dating back to at least WW2 (including TCE -- I've never heard it called "trike" -- among other contaminants) due to procedures like this. I can't really fault the people at the time though -- there wasn't really a thought out question of "wait a minute, where does all this stuff go and what does it do after we throw it out?" back then. I'm sure NASA, with its large LOX (liquid oxygen, not bagel topping) and general solvent needs has quite a bit of TCE just sitting at the bottom of their water table, maybe even pure product (where you get an actual layer of liquid contaminant.) There are methods other than pump and treat or ZVI to taking care of TCE, especially in such shallow environments (stimulated in situ biodegredation comes to mind) but to get back to your main question, yeah, that was SOP just about everywhere. Throw the solvent/washwater/etc on the gravel parking lot/sand sump/grass and don't think about it anymore.
Note: I work in the environmental industry, but I do not speak on behalf of my company, its stakeholders, or its clients. I also have no specific knowledge of the NASA site beyond what I read in the article.