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Six of Hanford's Nuclear Waste Tanks Leaking Badly
SchrodingerZ writes "A recent review of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state (where the bulk of Cold War nuclear material was created) has found that six of its underground storage tanks are leaking badly. Estimations say each tank is leaking 'anywhere from a few gallons to a few hundred gallons of radioactive material a year.' Washington's governor, Jay Inslee, said in a statement on Friday, 'Energy officials recently figured out they had been inaccurately measuring the 56 million gallons of waste in Hanford's tanks.' The Hanford cleanup project has been one of the most expensive American projects for nuclear cleanup. Plans are in place to create a treatment plant to turn the hazardous material into less hazardous glass (proposed to cost $13.4 billion), but for now officials are trying just to stop the leaking from the corroded tanks. Today the leaks do not have an immediate threat on the environment, but 'there is [only] 150 to 200 feet of dry soil between the tanks and the groundwater,' and they are just five miles from the Colombia River."
It's the future, I've been told. Surely all this old gloopy engineering and manufacturing is for Luddites? Just send a 3D printer!
These radioactive leaks are nothing to worry about. All it takes for Congress to actually do something about proper funding, regulations & oversight is a major disaster. How many people have been killed so far? None? Um, well, gee, I guess we'll have to wait until a lot of people die, or a politician or celebrity gets sick.
How much of this could have been avoided if Harry Reid and President Obama had not derailed the Yucca Mountain project? And if groups like Greenpeace weren't so effective in opposing solutions to nuclear waste storage? They cheered the end of the Yucca Mountain project and called its supporters morons. Where are we now?
"There's companies that are just so cool that you just can't even deal with it," - Bill Gates, about Google
... for the next 240,000 years, regardless.
I'm a fan of Columbia Crest wines, they make a great $13 Cab Sauv. Uh oh, the vineyard is only 40 miles from HNR, and downstream on the banks of the Columbia River...
"Clean, safe and .too cheap to meter!"
Is there any reason why we shouldn't reduce our current nuclear arsenal to something less than 1000 warheads, instead of replacing them with new ones? Can anyone think of a plausible situation where we would need 1000 nuclear warheads?
You are welcome on my lawn.
to embed it into molten glas or glasify the material.
The glas however will emmit nearly(embedding into another material -> shielding) the same amount of radiation, however:
The advantage it's encased and if it comes into contact with water or air such a glas brick will not release that much contaminant.
But neutron and alpha bombardmend for what I'm familiar with, leads to material degradation through the built up of new elements within the structure.
This is a problem when it comes to pressure vessels of nuclear fission reactors, because the new elements are defects within the crystaline structure and
defects are starter for cracks. (But glas has no crystaline structure)
The Hanford cleanup project has been one of the most expensive American projects for nuclear cleanup. Plans are in place to create a treatment plant to turn the hazardous material into less hazardous glass (proposed to cost $13.4 billion), but for now officials are trying just to stop the leaking from the corroded tanks.
Don't think of it as a nuclear waste clean-up project, environmental fiasco, or other government boondoggle. Consider it a gift of a $13.4 billion dollar jobs program. ;-) (one with reeeeeally high stakes if it's screwed up).
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
Just put a big block of concrete over it and forget there ever was anything there. The number one method of dealing with hazardous materials, worldwide.
STOP LEAK
OK, maybe that is two words, but it works in my car radiator. I would imagine Bardahl would donate a few thousand gallons just for the publicity.
Microsoft!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
One nuke won't do it.
Plant some evidence that it's a fiendish Al Quaeda radiological weapon; a dirty bomb with a long fuse planted by sleeper agents who hate the USA.
You seem to regard science as some kind of dodge... or hustle.
Y-E-S!
Where is Homer Simpson when you need him?
There is no relationship (other than historical) between the manufacturing processes and waste at Hanford, and modern nuclear power plants .
Indeed the problems in Japan would certainly be almost impossible with current designs.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
How about this, we clean up the mess we already have before we go making new messes? Make it true of all industries from coal to nuclear as well as oil. The problem is the industries always manage to move on and leave us stuck with the bill. Hanford was mostly used for weapons production but I believe they also produced some of the first reactor fuel. Make the military take the money from their budget for the clean up before they are allowed to buy any new toys. It's like making a kid clean up his room before they watch TV. Just make everyone responsible for the messes they make and the problem goes away!
Harry did the right thing. Yucca mountain was one of several sites being evaluated for desirable geological characteristics since the early 90's...one of 3 I think.
The original plan was that one of the 3 sites would be chosen based solely on technical merits however that was wishful thinking and in the end Yucca mountain was chosen because the politician from the other more populated states successfully shutdown those options because they of course do not want nuclear waste stored in their "back yards". So Yucca mountain is a place that nuclear waste *could* be stored...but there is nothing better about it than any where else. In fact Yucca mountain has seen several earth quakes since they started studying the site and they have also found a relatively high water table so there are probably many better places. The only benefit that Yucca mountain had was that was politically easier to force it on the people of Nevada than it was other places. The best place to store nuclear waste is at its source (so you dont transport it) and in properly maintained tanks. They have failed to maintain these Hanford tanks just as easily as they could fail to maintain Yucca mountains' facilities.
> Thanks Harry!
That's probably going to be the reaction of the people of Nevada as they learn more about Hanford.
Talking with the guys that do this at a job fair.
First, what could take so freaking long to clean stuff up? "Stuff you don't understand." Right, bureaucracy, nothing else.
Anyway, the waste from Hanford was stored in Single-Shelled Tanks (SSTs), until they later started storing it in Double-Shelled Tanks (DST's). The SST's are leaking, we know this, so this is not news. What's currently being done is pumping the waste from the leaking SST's into the DST's and cleaning the SST's. They do this because the vitrification plant is not built yet.
They're out of DST's. So now they have to decide whether to build more DST's or expedite the vit plant. Basically a few million dollars now, a few billion dollars now, or a few million dollars now AND a few billion dollars later.
I got to school at the WSU campus nearby, and this is all I've been able to get someone to tell me. Correct me if I'm wrong. I probably am.
Oh. Right. Safety. This stuff's NASTY. That's been holding it up for over 20 years.
Nothing to worry about, then. Now if it were the Columbia River, I would be a little nervous...
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
The nuclear waste problem was the biggest driver for germany's nuclear exit decision, for 30 years this was discussed and determined to be basically unsolvable. (The incident in japan led to a re-think of the exit-of-the-exit decision, but the doubts about waste handling had been there at all times).
To me, this is nuclear's biggest threat, and whenever I see discussions on slashdot this does not really seem to be an issue to US citizens at all. Why is this the case? Are these problems properly addressed in school and media? In germany, we have constantly very critical journalism regarding nuclear waste disposal, as we also have a site where waste is leaking and this proves to be a huge and expensive problem. Generally, storing waste for 10.000 years in a safe manner is not considered to be possible. (And think about the costs which occur in those timelines).
When reading slashdot, I always get the impression that people still think nuclear has a future, and that we simply have not got the right technology in place yet. To me, nuclear has been a dead end for years, and its only a matter of time that everyone needs to switch to renewables (which would happen in 20 years max). Is nuclear really considered as a real option by the general US population? Are the implications properly educated? Total costs of waste disposal and storage and the risks which remain?
Regards,
Lars
I remember reading about this problem in a Scientific American article, it was around 10-15 years ago.
Self awareness - try it!
This might be a good time to reread the pro-nuke propaganda put out by the government in the '60s and '70s. This kind of thing would never happen . . ..
Think about that propaganda in the current-day context of global warming and pollution propaganda.
You raise a meaningless point. No doubt many sites were evaluated. Ultimately Yucca was selected and billions were spent on development.
Now the project has been canceled for political reasons only, with no alternative plan.
Harry did the right thing for Nevada. The Obama administration did the wrong thing for America.
...is not a wikileak :D.
"150 to 200 feet of dry soil between the tanks and the groundwater,' and they are just five miles from the Colombia River.""
Seems like a great place to build a waste facility, nothing catastrophic there.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
We shouldn't take Hanford as a prototypical example of "The Nuclear Industry."
Remember, the people who planned, funded, and ran Hanford were in the process of building devices -designed- to kill people by the millions, and designed to be used in circumstances when people, by the millions, were dying here in the USA. Perhaps we should not forgive them, but we should understand their attitude that poisoning a few workers or a few thousand fish was just not on their radar. This was, in their understanding, war.
What Hanford was, and is, is a very brutal view of the simple fact that in war, lots of people are hurt, maimed, killed, poisoned, burned, and other forms of mayhem committed upon them.
Now, we as a nation and as a world, have the responsibility and opportunity to clean up our own mess, a mess that was caused by people who sincerely believed that a philosophical point and an economic model was worth murdering countless people. If nothing else, we need to learn from these experiences. We need to not forget that matters of ideology and economic theory do not count as much as living, suffering humans.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
I read once that 98% of America's high level nuclear waste comes from military programs.
Why is it then that 98% of the hot air voiced is about civilian uses?
http://www.pcffa.org/fn-sep02.htm
2002: Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations
It's just that we don't like the results much.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
You are wrong. It's called the sunk cost fallacy.
Yucca Mountain was an inappropriate location for a nuclear waste repository. As is Hanford. As were the salt domes. The best geologic sites were removed early on due to political considerations (think Wisconsin/Michigan and dairy country). The correct decision was made.
The entire process was known to be flawed. It was pretty obvious early on that eventually Nevada was going to be stuck with the site because it had the least political representation. It's only fitting that this political calculation turned out to be wrong in the end.
If you don't like the cancellation, then I suggest you complain to the legislators that made it a political rather than a scientific process. Of course, the fundamental problem with nuclear power is that its proponents view all of its problems as technical problems that can be solved. They ignore the fact that political decisions override technical ones.
That stands for Leaking Underground Storage Tanks. Welcome to New Jersey, Washington state. Good luck cleaning it up.
Can someone explain why radioactive waste is stored anywhere near a river? How was this ever considered a good idea?
"there is [only] 150 to 200 feet of dry soil between the tanks and the groundwater,' and they are just five miles from the Colombia River."
Who's dumb fucking plan was this?
Wow! I'm sure that nobody ever imagined that tanks storing radioactive waste might leak! What are the odds of... okay, just fill in a few paragraphs of sarcastic dancing around the negligence and ineptitude that is so sadly typical of expensive and unprofitable nuclear waste storage here.
Colombia is a South American country.
Geez people, yadda yadda yadda. Hanford's been around for decades, all the babble has been repeated countless times. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent there already, so ...
What we need to know is: how far downstream from the Hanford site is the first river radiation monitor? Where are the records for that monitor stored? Where is the website for that monitor's current status? In the event that it begins to monitor increases (particularly significant ones), who is going to respond, what is their plan, who is funding them, and what is the backup plan?
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
Isnt this one of those things that compels immediate (re)action? I thought when it came to things like public works, this was automatic. Need to issue some arrest warrants for everyone with the power to fix this doing nothing atm. wtf.
will work for dragon quest localization
I can remember watching an edition of CBS' 60 minutes back in the 1980's about how France is/was vitrifying radioactive waste. Here is a report (pdf) at WM Symposia saying how France has been vitrifying for twenty years.
Glass wasn't good enough in the 1970s which is why work started on synroc.
Just imagine how a project like this will be impacted with the start of Sequestration...everything gets cut, across the board. You think loss to the Military Budget will be hard to swallow, what about the budgets that clean these messes up, or prevent these messes in the first place, with inspections and so forth?
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
I absolutely understand your point about their attitudes back then. Nonetheless, the war ended some time back, and since then nobody wants to take responsibility for cleaning up the mess. They detected significant uranium, tritium and strontium-90 in the local water 25 years ago, and still nobody's been prepared to clean up the hundreds of square miles of disposal locations.
For all the advantages of nuclear power, *this* is the problem that environmental groups have with it. We know we can make power plants pretty safe, and we can even store the waste pretty safely - if we want to go to the trouble, and if we want to keep checking on the plants, fixing storage leaks, maintaining enough funding etc etc, regardless of what party is in power or how well the economy is doing, for many many decades and even centuries. This is long term stuff.
It's simply human nature to not want to keep dealing with an ongoing problem (applies to any toxic facility). A few decades go by, there's no obvious problems, and vigilance (and funding) wane. We've seen this over and over, when facilities get old enough. And when the inevitable problems do show up, the safety procedures are no longer what they once were. Will they still be enough, or will the locals get hit with a dangerous release? Will that be slightly above background, or will it reach disaster levels? That is where the real risks are, and our track record is not encouraging.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
A Question of Technology
Conventional nuclear plants are not indicative of all of what is possible with nuclear energy. Higher temperatures, dry cooling, higher efficiencies, low pressures and inherent safety features can be found in the far more promising fourth generation nuclear fission technology. The intention is to be able to produce an affordable nuclear energy machine that communities will desire. Nuclear bonds hold more than a million times the energy of the sources that dominate our current economy. While it is popular to assess wealth distribution as a matter of fairness, it would be more accurate and useful to relate it as a function of the cost of energy.
An Issue of Irrational Fear
It looks entirely feasible that we may produce the tens of terawatts of projected energy demand by 2050 with nuclear energy while lowering its cost, minimizing its environmental impact, and limiting the waste to merely millions of tonnes for the entire planet for hundreds of years. The role of the cost of fuel and waste for these systems is non-dominate within the economics. The worst of this "nuclear ash" is gamma-emitting caesium-137 (deadly even in small amounts), which only makes up a fraction of the yearly one tonne of waste (ideal thorium fuel cycle) from a GW-year of electricity. We can contain that at the source and either store it or bury it in an ecologically inert location. This can be done safely, but it is up to us to develop the waste management system. Much of the current nuclear 'waste' is actually fuel (U-238) for a next generation breeder/converter that can be located on the old site to reduce the waste pile while producing non-carbon-emitting energy.
A Course for Economic Justice
The extent of poverty globally is a very strong indicator that the current cost of energy is far too high. This implies a moral imperative to lower the cost of energy. Of course it is also apparent that carbon dioxide behaves as a forcing within our climate system, so we must also decouple generation (and the economy) from carbon emission. Non-nuclear renewable energy systems take a 'farming approach' which necessitates inherent costs and risks while coupling the economy to land and natural gas use. Mandating high energy costs and an uncompetitive economy is at complete odds with the goals of social justice through economic prosperity and environmental protection, and it is only ignorance and a very strained application of doublethink that sustains notions that a non-nuclear civilization is a viable and low risk alternative.
A Matter of Consciousness
Civilization requires a substantially more powerful economic adaptation if we are going to minimize our collective risk during the transition to sustainability. Why would anyone support an energy farming strategy unless:
1) they were convinced that nuclear energy production should be equated with ecological armageddon,
2) they were ignorant of the role of the cost of energy within the economy,
3) they were underestimating the environmental impact and overestimating the economic potential of energy farming,
4) they believe it is reasonable to wait until a "cleaner" form of nuclear energy is available.
Over the next few decades, the world must aim for tripling its energy production. What are going to be the environmental, economic, social, and ecological effects of our decisions? The importance of low cost clean energy for producing sustainable economic systems cannot be underestimated as energy is a fundamental input into all goods and services. Imagine massive nuclear desalination systems relieving land and water struggles within the Middle East. Cheap, smooth, quiet, and efficient transportation, revitalizing the tourist trade. Energy cheap enough so that we could afford to capture excess CO2 out of the atmosphere, mitigating the unintended effects of centuries of pollution. We can transform our world, if we choose the right technology. Tens of thousands of reactors manufactured somewhat like the airliners today on giant as
Right, there's no immediate threat to the environment. That's why they keep trapping radioactive wildlife.
Just launch this stuff into the sun. Hopefully the rocket doesn't explode on take off though.
Portland, Oregon, is hosed!