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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.
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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.
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.
Concrete. Lots and lots of concrete.
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.
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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Synroc was invented in 1978 and is a much better idea than vitrification.
Interesting argument, but incorrect. This crap was tipped into tanks a long time before Carter bacame POTUS.
Superficially, your argument looks interesting from an efficiency and waste disposal point of view.
After all, TFA says there's half a ton of plutonium mixed up in all the crap in the various tanks.
Sure, "burn" it! Urm, but where? Nearly all he FB reactors have been shut down. Gonna build one in Hanford?
Also, it seems that it's already insanely difficult and expensive just to figure out how to get the crap out of the tanks and vitrified safely. Trying to separate out the various forms of waste further, and then reprocess into rods would add another layer of complexity and cost.
...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.
This was a nuclear weapons facility - the economics were not much of a consideration.
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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.
Now look, if you really believe that we're not reprocessing waste to serve Carter, you're clearly quite insane. There has to be something else going on. Since this is a capitalism, all you have to do is follow the money. Who is profiting from the ban on fuel reprocessing? Those who produce nuclear fuels, for one. Who else?
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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.
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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You picked two examples where a minority of scientists were paid off argue against a massive, open concensus of other scientists, and claim that this minority is typical of "scientists". Then you talk about intellectual integrity!
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
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