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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).
This always happens. Lowest cost + government insurance = safety failure.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
They sent us Celiene Dion and Justin Beiber. I think that counts as a hostile country.
And don't get me started on Canadian bacon...
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.