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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).
Yeah we glow at night around here...
At some point, it would have been cheaper to pay another country to take it away for reprocessing and vitrification, even after considering the obscene cost of safely transporting one barrel at a time to said foreign country and transporting the glass logs back for long term storage.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
This always happens. Lowest cost + government insurance = safety failure.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
TFA says the waste has settled into layers, solids at the bottom, and the system they have will mix it all and pump out the sludge.
Wouldn't it be smarter to pump the liquids out first, and worry about the solid part later? They say the most urgent problem is that some tanks are leaking, and solids don't leak.
I don't know if you noticed but the US has been kind of bitchy lately about even our allies like Japan reprocessing their own reactor fuel locally for fear they might make weapons of it. I don't think anybody is going to get an export permit for Hanford's waste, which looks to have more uranium and plutonium in it (of the specific actinides) than is in the US arsenal. Even if they did - just pumping the tanks is almost certain death.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Seriously, why don't we just "burn" this? Add it as a contaminant to the fuel rods used in other reactors (or more realistically, since most of the waste comes from spent fuel rods, start recycling the damned things instead of trying to bury them).
All the furor over Yucca or Hanford or wherever, just to honor one of the single most short-sighted executive orders ever issued? Time to tell Carter where to stick his legendarily failed energy policy and move into 20th century tech for handling waste.
Seems like stupidity of a high order to me considering this has happened in nature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor and even in wartime they were really careful to keep things apart to avoid problems.
thou discernest my thoughts from afar
I dont think they are as efficient of a power source as nuclear, and are probably as dirty as coal.
Hippies are pretty dirty.
In 2000, the DoE and Bechtel National, Inc. (the contractor retained to build the Vitrification plant at Hanford) began construction of the plant before the design of the critical elements of the plant had been completed - in fact, before the design of many of those elements had even been started. The goal, to save time and money.
Trying to build a house? No problem... our construction team have built a few of those so they know what to do based on early architectural sketches and teamwork. But this is not a house, it is a vitrification plant for 50+ million gallons of the worst nuclear waste in the world with a total radioactive potential of around 170-180 million curies (Cernobyl released about half that). Oh, and that shit is not only hot radioactively, it is hot temperature-wise too.
Today, 60 of 177 storage tanks are leaking with the rest at a high risk of leaking, and if all goes well the complex to house the worst of the waste after vitrification will be built by 2048, with the whole vitrification process completed by 2062. Unless there are delays... after all, this is a government project, they are good at hitting project deadlines, right?
Each tank is layered, with a relatively solid layer at the bottom, a salt cake above that, then sludge followed by liquid and a gas layer. Sounds a bit like my toilet after a bad Chinese meal... only more of it. Most of the radioactivity is in the solids and sludge whereas most of the volume is in the liquids and the salt cake - you need the liquid to transfer the rest through the crappy piping and filters from the storage tanks to the vitrification plant, and it all has to flow fast enough to keep the solids moving without causing any blockages or radioactive buildups.
To top it all off, the glass mixture used in the vitrification process has to be tailoered to the mixture in the tank, and given the diversity of radioactive processes, materials and production methods in use on site, there will be at least 10 compounts required, with no way of knowing what is in what tank short of analysing the contents and getting a representative sample of everything in the tank.
Simple :-S
To my layman's mind, two things come to mind - 1. The whole thing is a complete clusterfuck, and it will be a miracle if the whole lot does not end very badly. 2, Top priority is to contain the leak in the immediate vicinity, but short of digging some massive trenches and excavating a huge foundation then filling the whole lot with some kind of radioactive-resistant concrete, and doing it in such a way that you can inspect the result for leaks, I cannot see how they are going to manage that.
Time to call in Bruce Willis and get him to start drilling, I guess.
Thorium molten salt reactors are much safer in the short and long term.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Synroc was invented in 1978 and is a much better idea than vitrification.
This is what happens when you are so frightened by a problem that you make it worse than if you had rationally dealt with it from the beginning. Storing the waste from each plant at the original site near populated areas is the worst case scenario for the dealing with this problem. The opposition to the Yucca Mountain facility has become politically irrational to the point of making impossible demands for it safe for millions of years. Thousands of years is completely feasible and just hundreds of years should be perfectly acceptable. All these by products will eventually be valuable resources to a future technology. It is criminal negligence and a national disgrace to keep these wastes in cooling pools and proposed dry casks at the plants where they were produced. One can only hope that rational decisions can be made in time to avert a self fulfilling disaster. The prospects for this look poor.
...when ANY article includes the phrase "spontaneous criticality." Seriously, that's up there with "Honey, something's been bothering me" as a phrase you never, ever want to hear in any context.
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
Yeah, but they're renewable. You're just returning the patchouli carbon back to the environment it came from to begin with. Like a wood fireplace!
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Also bear in mind that the waste we're getting to deal with today - the waste that sets the tone about nuclear safety - is the end product of a really dodgy design process done decades ago. We can make safer, cleaner nuclear reactors now, but that's not going to make the slightest bit of difference to our clean-up operations for quite some time.
Nuclear power really screwed itself.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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Prior to 2012, plenty of other problems were found at San Onofre: "Problems at nuclear plant concern regulators" in the San Diego Union Tribune covered a few of these which ended up "resulting in the simultaneous shutdown of two safety backup systems and placing operators on standby to shut down a nuclear reactor."
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In Florida, you've got the hubris of Duke Energy trying to repair a cooling tower on its own using its own idiots rather than hiring people expertly capable of doing things just to save $10M$us (ten million usa dollars) resulting in the total shutdown of the Crystal River nuclear plant until at least 2014 at a total cost of repair projected to be $2.75B$us (2.75 Billion usa dollars): http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/03/01/1894613/nuclear-fiasco-vexes-progress.html : The problems experienced at Crystal River stem from a botched attempt to replace the plant's steam generator. The replacement required cutting a giant hole - measuring 23 feet by 27 feet - in the 42-inch-thick protective wall of the building that contains the nuclear reactor. To save money, Progress opted to manage the project on its own and awarded the contract to an engineering firm that had no experience in such repairs. The work resulted in three instances of "delamination," a term used to describe an internal separation of the building wall. Each delamination is the size of a basketball court, said Florida's Deputy Public Counsel, Charles Rehwinkel. "They were definitely three separate events, or discrete incidents," he said.
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The blunder shows that a highly experienced nuclear operator with a sterling reputation in the industry is not immune from unforeseen miscues that raise questions about judgment and competence.
The sequence of mistakes has put Progress in a state of crisis management for more than two years. Company officials are dealing with persistent questions from Wall Street analysts while they negotiate data requests from the insurer, Nuclear Electric Insurance Limited, known as NEIL.
http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/energy/crystal-river-nuclear-plant-had-flaw-in-its-safety-procedures-for-more/1276841 also shows that Crystal River had other serious problems, just like so many other plants that consistently skirt safety regulations and prescribed critical safety procedures:
4 generator failures hit US nuclear plants in in AP article: Four generators that power emergency systems at nuclear plants have failed when needed since April, an unusual cluster that has attracted the attention of federal inspectors and could prompt the industry to re-examine its maintenance plans.and those are just from a quick cursory review from a web search engine. People who look harder can find more. The common link in all of these are shortcuts taken to save money and to bypass conventional procedures which are required to be followed by the NRC.
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
http://www.iaea.org/
Union of Concerned Scientists
http://www.ucsusa.org/
The NRC and Nuclear Power Plant Safety
2012 Report.
World Nuclear News
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/
NPUA.org: Nuclear Professionals Union of America
http://www.npua.org/
Canada Nuclear Power Industry Safety
http://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/
15TW = 15,000 Nuclear Reactors. (Approx. one accident a month.)
Like maybe burn all the overzealous anti-nuclear campaigners.
So just to be clear, nuclear is done wrong and has always been done wrong, but the problem is the anti-nuclear activists? You're backing an industry that doesn't give a fuck about what harm it causes. If that ever changes, it might be sane to back it. Until then, the only sane sources of more power are wind and solar, as the only renewables whose installation does not cause major environmental impact.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That's just what Harold Finch wants you to think.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
In case anyone wants to use this incident to bash nuclear power, it's worth noting that Hanford was not a civilian nuclear power plant. It was a U.S. Government owned and operated site that produced plutonium for nuclear warheads. The military wasn't required to follow any kind of environmental or safety standards for most of the site's lifetime, and they didn't.
I suppose it was not clear I was joking. Let me put on a slightly more serious note: ...)
- anti-nuclear activism has caused a massive drop in support for further development of this technology, so much that research money in the field is almost nonexistent. Furthermore, they have prevented construction of newer replacement power plants of improved designs to replace the old with the result that the old are kept alive longer risking more catastrophic failures rather than graceful shutdown and dismantling. Lastly, they have prevented (in collaboration with the government on that aspect) development and construction of breeder plants which would reduce the waste problem by a whopping 99%. There are breeder plants around, but not enough and some are idle due to political pressure. Very lastly, fear of all things nuclear has also shut down research reactors for making neutrons, at least in Japan, seriously hindering many fields of science (biology, materials science,
- Wind is an option, but we have to get away from the idea of 24/7 power. If there is wind, there is power. Too many people here in Japan scream for renewables but are unwilling to change their energy consumption (and poor, poor insulation) and energy expectations. Change that mindset and I'll be rooting for wind.
- Solar is not a good option as solar cells require rare earth metals. As was recently said at a conference, it is impossible to power even Australia with just solar cells: as soon as you've produced enough cells you have depleted all earth resources of several rare-earth metals. That just leaves the rest of the world without solar power.
- Nuclear fusion is hypothetically interesting, but funding is very scarce for this field which slows down progress by decades. Nuclear fusion scientists are now fighting for money to exist as opposed to actually doing science.
So, we're not out of the woods yet.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
The DOE really has no incentive to finish this boon-doogle Hanford Vitrification..a protracted government/corporate sweetheart project in this case (Bechtel Engineering who is not engineering company of 40 years ago) a project involving large numbers of people (mostly engineers since they've been 'redesigning this project for 30years spending Billion$) the mother load of usually heavy expenditures---forever. ....and never get anything built. It pays to bribe politicians!!
just like it's cheaper to have India dismantle old asbestos boats: because they do it without regard to worker safety. It's pretty clear from just the summary let alone TFA that the problem here is the company that got the contract did everything on the cheap for as much profit as possible. If there's a problem with nuclear power it's that as soon as profit motive and corporations gets involved they first thing they do is slash safety to boost revenue.
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Solar is not a good option as solar cells require rare earth metals. As was recently said at a conference, it is impossible to power even Australia with just solar cells: as soon as you've produced enough cells you have depleted all earth resources of several rare-earth metals. That just leaves the rest of the world without solar power.
This is just completely wrong. Every single sentence. Solar cells do not require rare earth metals. You can use them in the glass to increase UV absorption, but they are by no means critical and most manufacturers AFAIK do without them. Ban their use in solar cells and nothing changes.
It is fairly typical for the why-can't-I-have-free-nuclear-power Slashdot crowd though. The market spoke. Nuclear power is too expensive unless the alternative is hamster wheels. If you think the market is wrong, go invest in nuclear power. There are plenty of places around the world who would like some cheap electricity and look the other way when it comes to regulations.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Funny, as I have colleagues researching alternatives to using rare earth metals in solar cells, as well as colleagues searching for better alternatives to rare earth metals in wind turbines (dysprosium being a rather expensive one). I do not come empty-handed though, I have a reference: http://phys.org/news/2012-09-rare-earth-metals.html
That reference says explicitly that rare earth metals are used in solar cells. But I suppose my colleagues and my reference are "just completely wrong".
Your second paragraph is an ad hominem and a "wisdom of the crowds" statement. So many people believe in Homeopathy, so it must be true. But I guess that is typical for anti-nuke Slashdot crowds.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
Wind is an option, but we have to get away from the idea of 24/7 power.
I agree, in fact, I couldn't agree more.
Solar is not a good option as solar cells require rare earth metals.
They're using less and less of them, and the organics are coming along.
Nuclear fusion is hypothetically interesting, but funding is very scarce for this field which slows down progress by decades. Nuclear fusion scientists are now fighting for money to exist as opposed to actually doing science.
I do believe in research into fusion. Hell, I even believe in research into breeder reactors. I don't believe in any other form of nuclear power until we start actually solving the waste problem.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
We have long been told that science had nuclear technology in the bag, be it for military or civilian use. Of course, at the same time "scientists" have told us there was no link between smoking and cancer, or, more recently, between human activities and global warming.
It is little wonder that the public distrusts scientists, (unless, of course, they say what the public wants to hear), for many put their integrity up for sale. To paraphrase Twain, "There are lies, damned lies, and science." It is truly sad for those who recognize the importance of scientific integrity.
I oppose nuclear power because even if the technology itself is completely safe, it requires management by human beings who inevitably corrupt and break the technology for any of a dozen different reasons. Everything from short term greed to impressing a girl friend, to simple curiosity about whether the backup safety features will really work if we push this button....
There is nothing at all wrong with nuclear technology if we only had a race of supermen to do it for us.
Will
Wind is an option, but we have to get away from the idea of 24/7 power.
I agree, in fact, I couldn't agree more.
A few years I heard that a Dutch metalworks factory (aluminium plant?) has an interesting arrangement with NUON, an energy company. NUON will provide cheap electricity to the metalworks factory if there is energy from their turbines. The factory can then make a decision to run at odd (but cheap) hours. That sounded smart to me.
Solar is not a good option as solar cells require rare earth metals.
They're using less and less of them, and the organics are coming along.
There are some interesting numbers coming out of the research (I believe we are at a few percent now), but lifetime, printability and base chemical cost are still to be improved before we have a viable organic solar cell. With the money being poured into that field, I suspect that may take five to 20 years but I am no longer very connected with that field.
Nuclear fusion is hypothetically interesting, but funding is very scarce for this field which slows down progress by decades. Nuclear fusion scientists are now fighting for money to exist as opposed to actually doing science.
I do believe in research into fusion. Hell, I even believe in research into breeder reactors. I don't believe in any other form of nuclear power until we start actually solving the waste problem.
I agree. Let's get the funding back, fire the beancounters, get the press out of the sensationalist mindset and let's get back to science.
Cheers!
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
The Machine was stored there but now it's just a big empty warehouse.
That the human race should just call it a day, we're just not up to this (one time, pretty nasty) task of cleanup?
The article does show that they're aware of the dangers and are dealing with the problems --- and we will learn quite a bit about these materials in the process. As we must.
If everyone is too timid, perhaps they could approach the people who milk rattlesnakes day after day to obtain the venom that is desperately sought for medical research. They probably do it with a minimum of dramatic fanfare, a sensible appreciation of risk and an appropriate dash of humor.
It is possible to isotopically separate people into two distinct groups. Those who will just dig into the problem taking common sense precautions with the goal of vitrifying all of this dangerous material. There is risk and for that risk they should be amply rewarded.
And those on the sidelines who are secretly hoping for some cataclysmic disaster to occur, something exciting and scary to bring the fulfillment of hopping in circles saying I told you so. The commercial nuclear power industry in America has cheated these people of their Pyrrhic victory for decades, quietly operating at peak efficiency and responsibly (though not appropriately) storing and watching over their waste pools.
Jimmy Carter has been adequately taken to task in this thread for his decision to take the United States back into a 'dark age' of nuclear ignorance. But he was just channeling the Jane Fonda crowd.
Admiral Rickover is another person who should carry blame. He presided directly over the Atoms For War program but even that does not arouse my ire so much as he directly sabotaged research and development of safer and more sustainable nuclear technology.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
What rare earth metal is used in traditional Poly-Si solar cells?
It's absolutely perfect; except that every single implementer has fucked up horribly.
But it'll work next time!
one quote... " although the current risks are real, they are unlikely and would be of low magnitude if they did occur." same old crap that has been put on a rubber stamp and whacked down on every paper ever associated with nuclear energy.
in virtually every case, that blind faith has been proven to be bullshit someplace in the world.
which is the reason Hanford Worls' site is purely and evilly contaminated, with the worst yet to come.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Thus far 217 comments. It's difficult to believe that there are 217 people in the entire world with reasonable knowledge of the subject matter. Oh for the days when people were smarter, or braver, or just plain more determined. Even if we all can't agree what should be done with the Hanford facility, it would be nice nice as a country to have the option/ability to do something other than nothing.
Sounds more like a heating story.
Most of those leaky tanks are full of leftover waste from 40's-60's military projects and nobody has any good idea what's in them. They have remote monitors for radioactivity and temperature, but mostly people stay as far away from them as possible. As anyone who's been there knows they have three alarms 1) evacuate 2) shelter in place and 3) you are going to die and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
I'm so happy this shit is sitting in the USA and not anywhere else in the world.
That we know of so far ... I think India and Israel ran pretty clean operations, but I suspect that Pakistan, North Korea, Iran didn't give a shit about environmental concerns when developing their nuclear weapons programs; the environmental disregard of Russia and China are legendary.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
plutonium or something...
Oh, wait...
Which is exactly the problem that synroc was devised to solve and why it's taken so long to test. It's about encorporating any reactive element into it's structure instead of just wrapping stuff up in a glass and hoping that you can put it in a dry enough place where water won't leach stuff out over time.
It's a very cool idea that was poorly funded for years due to idiot fanboys counterproductively insisting that nuclear was "clean". Their bullshit actually delayed turning their dreams into reality.
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Folk need to "Man up".
This is a real issue -- and the key problem is that too many want a 100% guarantee.
I cannot for the life of me understand why the repository in Nevada never happened. Even if material was lain in sand inside concrete coffins as a 25 year solution in contrast to the life of the universe. Not too different than the thousand year old burial tunnels hand dug in the tufo outside of Rome (Catacombs of Rome).
Those that want a permanent solution are missing the boat big time. As we are seeing from the problems in Japan on site storage is not ideal. The material needs to be moved into a physically safe location. Transport can be in serious reinforced vaults on rail.
Robots today could make audit and security safer. Robots could operate and monitor the tunnels relentlessly.
There are other mountains that would make for good 25-50 year vaults as well.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.