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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).
Hanford's waste isn't fuel rods. It's what fuel rods are turned into after being dissolved in acids to extract weapons-grade Plutonium. The vast majority is in a liquid state, combined with caustic chemicals as a waste product from the PUREX process.
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I spent three years out on the construction of this plant. I got to experience first-hand the ridiculousness that is Bechtels capability of managing a large project such as this.
No budgeting mastermind could account for the constant shoehorning of new "safety" requirements being implemented each week. They have teams out there whose sole purpose is to wander the site and find ways to do things "safer" and identify potential safety concerns. What really happens is they end up creating copious amounts of make-work by identifying the most assinine of "safety issues" and turning a simple job that should take 5 minutes to complete into a 6-month affair of analysis and approvals before finally deploying 6 people to complete a 5 minute job that only needs 1 person (and which only one of the six people actually does anything, the rest are there to watch.... for safety....)
Tap a steel beam with a scissor lift? That half of the building where it occurred is shutdown for "investigation"
Pinch your hand between a steel beam and your Boom lift? half-day safety "lockdown" for whole site. All lifts banned. Scaffolding now mandatory for all work requiring elevation off the ground (Hint: almost all of it). Side-note: there is only enough scaffolding and the personnel to build it to service 1/6th of the site. You now have to request 2 months in advance for scaffolding to complete a job that could be done today in 2 hours with a scissor lift.
Two cranes tap eachother? Site shutdown. (granted this was a fairly serious issue, but a whole site shutdown?) followed by half-day sitewide "safety lockdown" the next day
A little wind? Or a little ice? site shutdown. send everyone home. Even if they will be working inside a covered building.
Someone bumped a port-o-potty with a golf cart? half day "safety lockdown" for the whole site. golf-cart use severly restricted. (its a big site, golf-carts are used extensively for traveling between all the facilities)
Considering there can be roughly a thousand workers out there working on this plant for 40 hrs each week, there were lots of opportunities for little accidents. Problem is, each tiny accident is treated with such an elevated response that it stops hundreds of people from working, if not the whole site. Then each accident gets "prevented" in the future by disallowing use of whatever tool was being used when it happened. Doesnt matter if that means it will take ten times longer to get the same job done, or if it will create far more opportunities for new accidents to occur.
I'm all for getting things done safely, but theres a difference between safety, and milking a contract for every penny with artificial delays and "unexpected costs"
Safety aside, someone already touched on the other big cause for delay and increased costs: they are actually engineering the site while its being built. Normally you would have all your plans ready and have worked out any major kinks in the design before you start construction, but they've thrown caution to the wind and began well before many of the workings of the facility were more than just concepts. They've had to go back and re-design entire buildings to add almost twice as much structural steel simply because they didnt expect the components going inside the building to be "so heavy"
Pretty much anyone you speak to out there would have a damn good laugh if you were to state you beleived Bechtel was competent at anything aside from finding creative ways to make money at the expense of everyone else.