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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).
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
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.
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.
Hanford is not a civilian site. This is the waste from the plutonium production used for weapons.
Spent fuel from the civilian industry usually has the form of ceramic uranium oxide inside tubes made from a zirconium alloy.
You can vitrify that too ( England does) , but there is no absolute need for it. The geological disposal planned by Finland and Sweden
does not rely on it as example, and in the US reprocessing civilian nuclear fuel is currently illegal.
What you're doing is a little bit like pointing to aviation deaths in the air force and trying to claim it proves you should not travel with Airbus. It isn't very rational.
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
. 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.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
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.
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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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.
Wow, what a load of bullshit are you spewing there. Care to back it up with some actual factual data?
... Not just environmental (apparently, that's our grandchildren's problem, as always)
Though in this case, we are the grandchildren of those who set up Hanford. The chickens are coming home to roost - on us.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
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.
These same rare earths are needed for nuclear power plants (neodymium magnets, copper wires and suchlike). Indeed they are needed for all power plants.
But once they were used in nuclear power plants, radioactive contamination makes them impossible to recycle.
That's just pure FUD. Anything on the clean side of the reactor (basically anything this side of the primary heat exchanger is just like any other power plant. I can asure you anything copper is no where near the "dirty" side of the reactor, it just isn't a suitable material. And I'm not sure why you'd need neodymium magnets anywhere. I'd imagine any generator or motor magnets would be eletromagnets.
Even for materials exposed to nuclear waste, things like metals can be cleaned then recycled, the cleanup waste then being considered nuclear waste. Most metals can be recycled. Concrete that's been exposed to nuclear waste (like water from cooling ponds) can be tricky, but metal cladding is used for such ponds, that can be stripped and cleaned, leaving the underlying concrete clean of nuclear contaminants.
Your worried about a minor nuclear event that will never have a death attributed to it directly...
And completely ignoring the towns that simply ceased to exist due to the tsunami?
Hundreds or thousands dead ... And your freaked the fuck out about a nucleAr uptake increase that's lower than the airplane flight you'd take to get there.
You have absolutely no clue what you should ACTUALLY be worried about.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
All good questions. Some investigations are yielding some some answers.
"Bottom-dwelling fish in the Fukushima area show radioactivity levels above the limit of 100 becquerels per kilogram set by the Japanese government. Greenlings, for example, have been found to have levels as high as 25,000 becquerels per kilogram." That's more than just a little excess.
In concrete terms, losses to the fishing industry exceeding a billion dollars are mentioned, with "many fisheries" still closed as of November 2012.
Was the evacuation necessary? Well, it's the government's decision to make, and they made it. Some 4,500 square miles – an area almost the size of Connecticut – was found to have radiation levels that exceeded Japan’s allowable exposure rate of 1 mSV (millisievert) per year. 310 square miles were declared "permanent" exclusion zones. Estimates of the lost economic value of these losses range from $250 to 500 billion.
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.
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 ....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It should be fairly obvious from the context that "done right now" would clearly not apply to things that have already long since have been done.
Nevertheless it is good to see your humility:
please stop spouting shit
Nonetheless:
With respect, are you really trying to say there are no reactors remaining of the same design as that one in Chernobyl?
From the wiki:
""After the Chernobyl disaster, all RBMKs in operation underwent significant changes, lowering their void coefficients to +0.7 Î. This new number decreases the possibility of a low-coolant meltdown.""
So yeah, I am also claiming that there are no reactors with the same design as the Chernobyl one still operating, since all remaining operational RBMKs have been significantly modified to correct that particularly glaring design flaw.
a quick google search would have shown you is shit
Touche.
SJW n. One who posts facts.