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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.
No it isn't, with even a cursory look into the situation. Yucca mountain was for spent fuel rods from commercial plants. This disaster area is the leftover crap from reprocessing fuel to extract the Plutonium. Yucca mountain was primarily for commercial reactors - this was a government-run site.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Yucca Mountain was designed to store wastes AFTER they had been immobilized and put in long-term storage casks.
The problem here is that they haven't even started that first step. This is still millions of gallons of raw liquid waste, in a state that is totally unsuitable for interstate transport and burial. If Yucca Mountain were up and running today, it wouldn't help this problem one bit.
If they actually took the initiative to solidify this waste now and put it in casks, they could safely store it on site for decades or centuries, just like they're currently doing with commercial reactor waste. They don't need something like Yucca Mountain to address the current risks.
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
Yucca mountain could not handle the millions of gallons of waste at Hanford, even if you could find a a way to transport it safely. The largest-scale part of the problem is the roughly 10x20 mile patch of contaminated groundwater, for which Yucca would do nothing.
But step back from numbers for a moment and just use some reasoning... if they can pick it up and bring it to Yucca, then it's not an expensive cleanup issue, is it? Sure, it's no fun to build on-site storage - but it certainly doesn't have much to with cleanup.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.