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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."
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Indeed the problems in Japan would certainly be almost impossible with current designs.
We should really deal with the problems at hand rather than espouse the virtues of things that do not yet exist. In fact, a non-negligible percentage of currently operating nuke plants in the US absolutely could suffer a catastrophic disaster like Fukushima –not from tsunami, but from earthquake or perhaps terrorism, and in a similar fashion (if the plant loses power and it isn't restored before the batteries die, they'll experience the same form of meltdown).
Please come up with a safe solution for current problems, and cease the handwaving dismissal of these problems because more modern on the drawing board designs won't have the same flaws. Building a plant that can't melt down like Fukishima does NOTHING to fix the damage done by Fukushima or the very real possibility of a Fukushima-scale accident occurring at currently operating plants.
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
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?