Hanford Nuclear Waste Vitrification Plant "Too Dangerous"

Noryungi writes "Scientific American reports, in a chilling story, that the Hanford, Washington nuclear waste vitrification treatment plant is off to a bad start. Bad planning, multiple sources of radioactive waste, and leaking containment pools are just the beginning. It's never a good sign when that type of article includes the word 'spontaneous criticality,' if you follow my drift..." It seems the main problem is that the waste has settled in distinct layers, and has to be piped through corroded old tubes, leading to all sorts of exciting problems (e.g. enough plutonium aggregating to start a reaction).

Comments

Greed

[Endimiao]

And this is why people oppose nuclear power. It's harder to screw things up at such level with renewables. The simpsons greedy bastard running a nuke plant isn't a fiction. It's a damned archetype.

Re:Greed

[Anonymous Coward]

You are comparing nuclear power to experimenting and create nuclear weapons... Nuclear Power as it is today is very safe, reliable, and cheap if done correctly. People oppose nuclear power because they are scared because of their ignorance.

Re:Greed

[Anonymous Coward]

Sort of. Nuclear Power as it is today is very safe, reliable, and cheap if done correctly. But there is the problem. It is all too often not done correctly. And nuclear power plants have massively destructive consequences when they fail.

Re:Greed

[ionix5891]

Except your windmills and solar panels need all sorts of exotic arare earth materials which cause huge amounts of environmental damage when mining and processing in places such as China, out of sight out of mind eh?

Re:Greed

[AmiMoJo]

There is evidence that even when things were "done correctly" at Fukushima there were completely unexpected failure modes that no-one had predicted. That's the biggest challenge in engineering safety - handling things that are literally unpredictable.

Re:Greed

[ledow]

I could rant too, but I just need to pick up on something.

Current estimates of WHAT WE KNOW NOW, just for Uranium, with current technology and current prices? Gives us about 700 years of nuclear power. If we haven't found something else by then, we're in trouble. And that's JUST Uranium.

Oil? In terms of usefulness for energy production, we'll be lucky to get 100. Damn lucky.

Flying is pretty safe when done right. We got there in the end. Space travel is pretty safe when done right. We got there too. And we got there by government intervention. It's not good enough to write off a technology because people mishandle it - we have to find ways to make mishandling impossible and/or impose extremely severe penalties for mishandling, with billions of guidelines for what to do and what not to do. Fact is, 50 years ago we were still putting asbestos in buildings materials. It took a LONG time to learn that it was stupid and even longer for government to stop it happening. But abandoning all housebuilding until we sort the problem wasn't really an option.

Some countries don't need nuclear power. Granted. Some do. Exports from the US can't covert the world. And there's a question of efficiency. Although the US *might* be able to produce all its own energy - at what cost? Not just environmental (apparently, that's our grandchildren's problem, as always), but sheer financial. Not much scales as nicely as nuclear, or we wouldn't still be using it. When you "need" Gigawatts, you have two choices - fossil or nuclear. The renewables are an interesting distraction at the moment, but we could really argue that until Uranium runs out.

And, to be honest, nobody cares about yours or my opinions. They mean nothing. What matters is that it's possible to make an AWFUL lot of money out of nuclear by providing a product that people are willing to pay through the nose for (electricity) DESPITE the huge amount of infrastructure, planning, waste disposal, and safety concerns. No nuclear power station has ever not been profitable for the people running it.

The trick is not to argue over how to supply people with megawatt-hours of electricity to their house. We have any number of ways to do it, and they all cost about the same in the long run. The trick is to work out how to stop people requiring megawatt-hours of electricity each in the first place. Because that's madly-unsustainable in the long-term until we have some other technological breakthrough.

Fact is, until then, we're like someone in the 1920's arguing over what blend of petrol is more efficient in our non-catalytic-convertor cars, while still making a big mess for others to clear up through what is basically laziness and greed.

Re:Greed

[serviscope_minor]

. It is all too often not done correctly. And nuclear power plants have massively destructive consequences when they fail.

The only nuclear plant that failed with massively destructive consequences (and then far less than many mining disasters) was Chernobyl. It certainly wasn't done correctly: it had a huge positive void coefficient.

That simply does not exist any more. No one makes new reactors with a positive void coefficient.

Re:Greed

[Christian Smith]

There is evidence that even when things were "done correctly" at Fukushima there were completely unexpected failure modes that no-one had predicted. That's the biggest challenge in engineering safety - handling things that are literally unpredictable.

Fukushima was a catalogue of retrospective bad design, cover-ups, mis-management, a huge freaking earthquake and largest tsunami in memory devastating huge swathes of Japanese countryside and killing many thousands of people.

And still no deaths can be attributed to the nuclear aspect of the regional disaster. Perhaps even the destructive hydrogen explosions could have been avoided (thus preventing much of the fallout) if it had been allowed to vent, but as I understand it, that wasn't allowed due to the fear of "radioactive gases" being vented.

Three Mile Island and Fukushima show us Nuclear is inherently safe, only Chernobyl has had anything like a devastating effect on anything other than economics scales. And the Chernobyl reactors were a picture of how not to do nuclear power.

Re:Greed

[Blaskowicz]

That's because Germany dumps useless wind power on the grid when it's available. That doesn't do the baseload, which is nuke and coal. I wonder where's the drive to close down all coal power plants in the european territory.. Coal plants are fucking terrible and to conveniently use them is hypocrisy. Wind power sucks too, it mostly serves to damage power grids and to transfer subsidies from states to private companies that leech off it and paint themselves green while they cause additional greenhouse emissions from the back up gas plants and hidden costs of the irregularity (such as storage on expensive, wasteful and polluting batteries).

So, how can german "Greens" content themselves with the garbage they do? Close nuclear plants to use something worse intead. I hate those hypocrite self-styled ecologists or environmentalists who have no clue and give lessons.

Re:Greed

[dbIII]

Actually TMI and Fukushima show us that a lack of attention to detail can come back and bite because both were easily preventable incidents that happened due to shortcuts being taken. If TMI didn't have the strongest containment vessel at the time (due to the risk of a crash from the nearby airport) you'd be writing about a tragedy instead of the wake up call that led to a lot of improvements and a lot of older reactors that couldn't be improved being shut down. It only looks "inherently safe" because the people responsible for nuclear safety do not think the way the above poster does - they don't just trust in God, they tie up their horse as well.

Re:Greed

[ColdWetDog]

Fukushima is not like Three Mile Island. It was due to a magnitude 9 earthquake and the subsequent tsunami, not a lack of attention to detail. Seriously, why are you neglecting the most important detail of Fukushima?

Fukashima was due to TEPCO cheaping out and not reinforcing the sea wall WHEN IT'S OWN GEOLOGISTS SUGGESTED THEY DO SO GIVEN THE HISTORY OF FAULT LINES AND TSUNAMI PATTERNS IN THE AREA. And made worse by a string of stupid errors whose underlying theme was 'don't shut the systems down, we can fix them, if you really shut down fast we won't be able to restart easily'.

Yes, had TEPCO done the right things (upgrade the sea wall, resite the generators) it would likely stand as a testament to nuclear power's ability to weather whatever nature throws at them. Instead ....

Re:Hopeless

[newcastlejon]

Also, what happens if the country in question falls apart and someone decides they want to give it back to you later in the form of a dirty bomb?

I don't think there are many vitrification plants in Kreplakistan. It's far more likely the waste would be sent somewhere like France or Canada. Are you really that worried about the Canucks?

Re:Hopeless

[MachineShedFred]

They can't move it. It's not barrels, it's leaky underground tanks of the nastiest liquid ever created by man - big ones. They can't even figure out how to pump that caustic radioactive shit across the property it's already on, much less move it across a border or three.