What Fire and Leakage At WIPP Means For Nuclear Waste Disposal

Lasrick (2629253) writes "An underground fire and a separate plutonium leak at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) has left the US with no repository for transuranic (TRU) waste--that is, radioactive elements heavier than uranium on the periodic chart, such as plutonium, americium, curium and neptunium. WIPP is a bedded salt formation in New Mexico, chosen because of its presumed long-term stability and self-sealing properties, and it currently holds, among other things, 4.9 metric tons of plutonium. Despite assurances from the DOE that the plant would soon reopen, New Mexico has cancelled WIPP's disposal permit indefinitely. Robert Alvarez, who has served as senior policy adviser to the Energy Department's secretary and as deputy assistant secretary for national security, explores what happened at WIPP, and what it means for defense nuclear waste storage."

Comments

Oopsie!

[Peter Simpson]

[sigh] Yet another contractor who seems to have been doing the minimum required to get paid. Fire suppression turned off, flammable materieals stored after repeated inspections required that they be removed. Outsource responsibility and this seems to be the result. Words cannot express how disappointed I am that "business" seems to be going on "as usual" even when managing something as hazardous as nuclear waste.

Re:Oopsie!

[Frobnicator]

The problem is you need an organization that will care for the stuff for longer than than the recorded history of humanity.

We keep creating all this waste that we have no way to actually dispose of.

We can treat it, put it in a concrete cask, and store the casks somewhere, but we have no ways to actually dispose of it other than to wait for millions of years.

Nuclear waste is the most immediately dangerous after we create it. Highly toxic, easily misused, easily stolen and repurposed. (Not all nuclear waste is equal, most of it is fairly benign such as medical and industrial waste. Those little green "exit" signs will eventually classify as nuclear waste.) The really dangerous stuff, like the spent nuclear reactor fuel, we have no way to deal with. But as bad as it is, at least the planet can probably eventually filter through the stuff.

Plastic is less immediately toxic but we also have no way to realistically dispose of it. It doesn't biodegrade. We are ending up with sites like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch that continue to grow.

Sadly we keep making more and more trash that we cannot dispose of. Like most of humanity's history we care more about our immediate survival and our immediate convenience than the long-term survival and long-term convenience.

Re:Oopsie!

[BitZtream]

We keep creating all this waste that we have no way to actually dispose of.

Really? What waste is that? We can do all sorts of stuff to the waste we have to make it orders of magnitude safer ... AND get energy out of it in the process.

But wackos freak out because OMFG SOMETHING MIGHT GO WRONG ... even when we put it in someplace that if something does go wrong ... its okay ... like this particular incident.

There really isn't that much we can't reprocess, reuse and repeat until its not nearly as dangerous or there is a lot less of it.

And lets not be retarded, this stuff came out of the ground in the first place. Putting it back isn't going to be what kills us all.

Re:Oopsie!

[TubeSteak]

Yet another contractor who seems to have been doing the minimum required to get paid. Fire suppression turned off, flammable materials stored after repeated inspections required that they be removed. Outsource responsibility and this seems to be the result.

At what point do we stop blaming the contractors and start blaming a lax regulatory environment (which the contractors probably lobbied for)?

I expect the free market to behave like a 5 year old on a sugar rush.
What I can't accept is the adults' repeated refusal to punish bad behavior.
We have a regulatory framework. Enforce it.

Re:Oopsie!

[CrimsonAvenger]

but we have no ways to actually dispose of it other than to wait for millions of years.

If it has a half-life long enough that it will be around for "millions of years", then it's pretty much harmless.

Note that Pu-239 has a half-life of 24100 years (making it not very radioactive at the best of times), and in a million years 99.99999999997% of it will be gone (in other words, 100,000 tons of it (more than is to be had in the world today by a large margin) will be reduced to 32 micrograms).

Re:Oopsie!

[sjames]

The materials they are talking about are also known as nuclear fuel. We should be running reactors with it.

Re:Oopsie!

[AmiMoJo]

It's not "wackos" that are preventing the waste being used, it is the cost. What people like you don't understand is just because on paper you can build some cool piece of technology to deal with it doesn't mean it makes commercial sense to do so. No-one has been able to demonstrate a working commercial scale reactor of this type yet, and the smaller research/prototype ones have all had major issues.

If you can find someone willing to invest tens of billions in building one of these things and getting regulatory approval/certification, and taking on the risk of some problem developing during its lifetime that costs a fortune to fix or writes it off... Well, go ahead and build one. Until them stop whining and blaming imaginary boogiemen for not getting your cool toy.

And yeah, putting it in the ground is fine as long as you do it carefully so it doesn't get into the water table etc. You need to be sure that won't happen for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years, so it isn't a trivial thing to find a suitable spot and dig it out. Just like your first idea it looks easy on paper but in practice is somewhat more complex than you thought.

Re:Oopsie!

[fnj]

Half-life is half-life; there isn't a process we can use to change that

OK, to begin, the following is simplified to skip some points of extreme nuisance, and to be suitable for non nuclear engineers (like me).

Radioactive decay isn't as simple as one might be forgiven for thinking given the simplistic concept "half-life". You might ideally start off with a pure form of a single isotope of a single element. In practice, you never do. Reactor fuel as it goes into the reactor is about 5% U235, 95% U238, with traces of other elements and isotopes. When it comes out of the reactor, it is a lesser percentage of U235, still a bunch of U238 left, plus a bunch of plutonium and a witch's brew of other isotopes of elements resulting from the nuclear "cooking" in the reactor involving neutron bombardment.

But for simplicity, let's take an imaginary bunch of U235.

The U235 decays to Th231 in a decay process with a half-life of 704 million years
The Th231 decays to Pa231 in a decay process with a half-life of 25.5 hours
The Pa231 decays to Ac227 in a decay process with a half-life of 32,500 years
The Ac227 decays to 98.6% Th227 and 1.4% Fr223 in a decay process with a half-life of 21.6 years
The Th227 decays to Ra223 in a decay process with a half-life of 18.2 days
The Ra223 decays to Rn219 in a decay process with a half-life of 11.4 days
The Rn219 decays to Po215 in a decay process with a half-life of 4.00 seconds
The Po215 decays to Pb211 in a decay process with a half-life of 1.78 milliseconds
The Pb211 decays to Bi211 in a decay process with a half-life of 36.1 minutes
The Bi211 decays to 99.7% Tl207 and 0.3% Po211 in a decay process with a half-life of 2.15 minutes
The Tl207 decays to Pb207 in a decay process with a half-life of 4.79 minutes
The Pb207 is stable and hangs around for the balance of eternity

The first thing to realize is that an instant after the imaginary start with pure Uranium235, and continuing for many billions of years, we have a constantly changing mix of various isotopes of elements, shading from pure U235, and asymptotically approaching (but never mathematically quite reaching) pure Lead207.

The constituents of that mix are busy decaying all at their own rates.

But the individual decay rates are mathematical models. A tiny little bit of that U235 has already changed all the way to Pb207 within the first hour, and a tiny little bit is still stuck at U235 after some billions of years. The rate of each individual decay process averages out to the half-life given by the particular model for that process.

So to get all the way to the point: yes, you actually can effectively change the rate of transmutation of the stuff that comes out of the reactor. You can re-enrich it back to a sufficiently rich mixture of uranium and plutonium oxides (and do some other reprocessing chores, such as cleaning out the fission poisons so it's usable again) and put it back in a reactor. Or you can separate out the plutonium and put it in a nuclear bomb and that will transmute really fast if you set it off. After you take out the plutonium it is at least theoretiucally possible to re-enrich the remainder back to 5% U235 and put THAT back in a reactor.

Note that the process during reactor operation is not the same as the decay process. In the reactor, you can "use up" a substantial percentage of the starting U235 in just a few years, in the process "creating" a bunch of plutonium (more than one isotope!) where there was none.

Too bad it's impossible* to reuse nuclear waste

[denis-The-menace]

Too bad it's impossible* to reuse nuclear waste.

*Impossible because the rules in the US are as such that you are not allowed to do anything that could result in threatening the revenue stream to current nuclear energy giants. Guess who helped write them?

Technological solutions exists but China will have a solution within 10-20years and we will buy from them because of these "Super Important" laws.

When that happens, the US will rightfully become the banana republic it so desperately want to become.

Re:Too bad it's impossible* to reuse nuclear waste

[macpacheco]

I believe we need an all of the above solution (nuclear, solar, wind, biomass, ...). In reality, nuclear is just lip service, it's not really an all of the above solution. So I'm very loud when I sense the lip servicing, in the direction of exposing the lie (the lip service BS).

Nuclear is the only solution that could provide electricity to 100% of the world needs. The ONLY solution. Solar and Wind require huge technological breakthroughs in energy storage that are still in the future.

Re:Too bad it's impossible* to reuse nuclear waste

[macpacheco]

In the greenies world, nuclear was always an unacceptable evil. But if you look around, they protest even large hydro dams as well, claiming they are too expensive. They tried to abort construction of two large hydro dams in Brazil because "wind and solar would be less expensive".

The problem isn't the radical green mindset, it's when their opinion got traction and started infesting the general liberal mindset. That I believe happened as the main ripple effect of TMI.

We need to let the world know that radiation is everywhere. Our bodies are much more radioactive than the environment around us. Bananas are incredibly radioactive due to high Potassium 40 content. The big culprit is utter lack of rational radioactivity education. We should educate our young about radiation even more than we educate them about fire. At least fire we can just stay away from it. But radiation is everywhere.

transuranic (TRU) waste--that is:

[Fned]

transuranic (TRU) waste--that is, radioactive elements heavier than uranium on the periodic chart, such as plutonium, americium, curium and neptunium.

Also known, in every country with a halfway-sensible nuclear policy, as "reactor fuel."

Re:transuranic (TRU) waste--that is:

[macpacheco]

Until its mandated that all nuclear operators must reprocess nuclear fuel at least twice this will continue, because it's cheaper to build nuclear fuel from freshly enriched uranium instead of doing reprocessing. Some will say "but reprocessing isn't legal". It is legal in the USA, it's just not done as it's more expensive than building fresh fuel.

This isn't politics, it's economics. Reprocessing of nuclear fuel was forbidden for a while late 70s/early 80s, but that prohibbition has been rescinded for decades.
Now it's very likely that should a nuclear reprocessing facility starts, it will attract thousands of crackpot anti nuclear protesters from all over the world to protest that reprocessing is _____ (insert your favorite bad word).

Re:transuranic (TRU) waste--that is:

[nojayuk]

The problem is that any waste-burning reactors will still have to pay their way by generating electricity at an affordable price even with an offset for the value of destroying some waste. The BN-series reactors the Russians are building and operating and the Chinese are considering buying can burn waste but not a lot of it and they require highly-enriched uranium and plutonium to generate the neutron flux needed. The financial details of how much the existing BN-series reactors cost to run are not transparent.

There's a lot of Powerpoint Warriors in the waste-burning business, not many folks pouring concrete and bending metal. It's the same with proponents of small modular and thorium molten-salt reactors. The financial costs of licencing, building, operating and eventaully decommissioning such paper designs tend not to be emphasised in the flashy slide presentations.

Re:transuranic (TRU) waste--that is:

[careysub]

It was politics, now it's economics.

Carter killed reprocessing with an executive order. Reagan lifted the order.

But, as you say, there wasn't enough financial incentive to restart reprocessing in the US, so we've just stuck with new fuel ever since.

Gerald Ford "killed reprocessing" with a Presidential directive to shut down reprocessing in October 1976. But there was no plant to shut down at that point. (It is true that Carter also issued an Executive Order, but shutting down something that was already shut down, and forbidding something already forbidden means no change in the status quo).

The U.S. only ever had one reprocessing plant (as opposed to a weapons plutonium extraction plant) which was at West Valley, New York which was shut down in 1972 due to contamination problems, then abandoned by its operator Nuclear Fuel Services, Inc. in 1975 rather than clean it up. So private industry had already screwed up and washed its hand of a commercial and environmental disaster, ending U.S. reprocessing, before Ford ever issued his Directive.

If commercial re-processors require a subsidy to build a plant, what does that say about the commercial viability of the whole idea?

Re:transuranic (TRU) waste--that is:

[dbIII]

That's the wrong way of looking at things. Reprocessing is about recovering usable fuel material, it's not about reducing waste and it actually results in increased amounts of nuclear waste. Lots of neutrons flying about do that sort of thing to equipment used for reprocessing. It's also difficult due to the high strengths and melting points of the materials in the fuel rods. It's potentially useful, and there's a new US facility doing it or about to do it, but it's not waste disposal method.
There's also some liquid metal ideas that can use spent fuel without the difficult reprocessing and that potential uses even more of the very active stuff. The US nuclear lobby saw that sort of work as a threat (and shut it down in the 1990s) but India has picked up the torch and is doing some research along those lines.
Long term what's left over can be stuck in glass (not silica but a glass structure), or even better chemically bonded into a material can even be safely stored in a wet environment (Synroc). Shoving it in drums and hoping they don't get wet leads to stories like the one we are commenting on.

Re:Fucking NIMBYs

[Frobnicator]

Desert? yes. Worthless? No.

Deserts are usually less exploitable by humans, but they are extremely valuable to the planet. Through sorry experience we have learned that desert ecosystems are easily damaged. Vehicles driving across the surface can crack and break the crust of micro-organisms ("desert pavement") where the damage can last for centuries.

The thought process of "Humans cannot immediately exploit the resources, therefore it is worthless" is extremely foolish.

Just look at what humans have done to resources we consider valuable. Deforestation of entire contents, fishing out oceans to possibly the point of exhaustion. Desert regions are one of the few resources left mostly intact from human destruction.

Offtopic: Meltdowns that don't power generators

[BitZtream]

Can someone explain to me why a reactor can overheat and meltdown like in Japan ... but not have the energy to spin the turbines to power cooling?

How can it get so hot that it boils the water way even under ridiculous pressures ... but that heat can't be used to power turbines?

Am I to believe that reactors actually generate more power when shutdown than when powered up?

I just can't fathom why a plant can SCRAM and then overheat ... but be unable to cool itself. Someones design is WAY fucked up me thinks. Its generating too much steam ... USE IT ...

Re:Offtopic: Meltdowns that don't power generators

[jafac]

Because the high temperature of the molten fuel, you can't design a container for it, and without a container, you can't pressurize the steam to spin a turbine.

Your other question, about why a plant can SCRAM and still overheat; yes, someone's design IS way fucked up. These older-design reactors create a large amount of short-lived decay products, (basically, the leftover bits of atoms after the uranium nuclei split) - some of these are stable, and most are not, and they will also decay. When these decay products decay, they also create waste heat. (a lot). And while the reactor is designed to moderate and use that heat, the chemical makeup of the fuel is always being altered as those Uranium atoms split. When a reactor is SCRAMmed, the Uranium fissioning stops, but the decay products continue to fission. This stuff has to "burn off" and it can't be rushed, it simply takes time. The heat from this process is called "decay heat" and it is what makes these reactors dangerous even after shutdown. If this decay heat is not removed actively by pumping water, it will build up, and at about 2000 degrees C, the zirconium cladding of the fuel acts as a catalyst, and splits the cooling-water into H2, and O. Any source of ignition will cause a Hydrogen explosion. (which is what happened at TMI first - which is why plants must now have venting systems to get rid of excess Hydrogen - and Fukushima's failed). Zirconium also tends to burn pretty well at that temperature - especially when exposed to pure oxygen. The hydrogen explosion will often damage the cooling equipment, (and the rest of the building) and then you're really fucked, because at 2800 degrees C, the uranium dioxide (fuel) begins to melt down.

Yeah, it's a design flaw, but you know, economical choices must be made in order to provide electricity that's "too cheap to meter".

Re:Offtopic: Meltdowns that don't power generators

[WindBourne]

The real problem is that these are antiquated system and they did NOT have diesel back-ups like they were required.
Instead, they need NEW reactors that have designs that will prevent anything like this from happening.
That is the advantage of the thorium design. ZERO chance of a meltdown unless laws of physic are broken, or the reactor is actually sabotaged from internally.

Re:Offtopic: Meltdowns that don't power generators

[AmiMoJo]

They actually had emergency cooling available at the time. There were some news reports that the lack of cooling was due to a lack of power, but that wasn't actually the case. They had backup batteries to run the pumps, and when that didn't seem to be working they had fire engines to pump water into the system. It's true that they should have had more available, but what they did have would have been adequate if it were not for the damage done by the earthquake. Not the tsunami, that did damage too, but he fatal problems were due to the earthquake's lateral forces.

The exact problems are still a little unclear, but we do know that most of the water pumped in did not reach the reactors to cool them. Some of the pipework was damaged, and some of the valves were in the wrong position. The failure of monitoring equipment and the fact that people couldn't physically access the valves to check them meant that this problem was not discovered until after the meltdowns.

NHK has produced a number of documentaries about this, they are well worth checking out.

Re:Shoot it to the sun?

[bob_super]

We already had that discussion...

1) Chose a subduction zone,
2) bury $Stuff_we_don't_want right next to it, a few km below the local ground surface.
3) wait for mother nature to push it down and dilute it in billions of tons of molten rock.
4) profit? nah, it's expensive... but at least don't worry about it.

Re:Fucking NIMBYs

[Toad-san]

Depends on what you consider damage. I submit that the tank and vehicle tracks left in desert areas during WW II exercises 70 bloody years ago might still be visible .. but I hardly consider them damage. You'll have to prove the value of "desert pavement" to me first. And your claim that deserts are "extremely valuable to the planet" is questionable too. I submit that the Gobi Desert was a lot more useful to the dinosaurs fossilized there when it was green and lovely than it's been for the past dozens of millions of years.

Re:Shoot it to the sun?

[sjames]

How about we blend it with DU and 'burn' it in a reactor?

Re:Shoot it to the sun?

[tlambert]

How about we blend it with DU and 'burn' it in a reactor?

Heretic!

How dare you propose a solution which is both workable by examples in France and Japan, and fails to support the idea that wind and solar can provide all the power we need (ignore the Solyndra behind the curtain)?!?!?!

I'm pretty sure we burned Joan of Arc at the stake for less than that!

Re:Shoot it to the sun?

[amorsen]

Cost to get to the Sun is worse than escaping the solar system. It would be cheaper to send the stuff to Alpha Centauri.

Thorium reactors; Use this 'waste'

[WindBourne]

Seriously, we need small reactors that use thorium like we had a couple of decades ago. We can get this going again in less than 5 years. With these, we can either augment current sites, or even replace current reactors and then burn up the waste, while getting energy.

Considering that the west is dealing with issues from Russia because of reliance on Russian energy, AND we have AGW occuring AND we have 'waste' disposal issues, I would think that the west would be smart enough to burn up all of that energy, and then bury only 5% of what they were going to. Heck, WIPP would handle EVERYTHING that we had left, and everything would be safe within 200 years.

Re:New Mexico

[WindBourne]

First off, you obviously know nothing about New Mexico. It is a beautiful state with a lot of interesting ppl (esp. the tribes). had I not responded here, I would have modded you down for this post
However, I fully agree with the rest. The idea of throwing away 'nuke waste' that is dangerous for 20K years, is insane, when it can be burned up and electricity is generated cheaply.

Re:IFR?

[dbIII]

That would result in reuse of some high grade nuclear waste but doesn't make it all go away by magic. You'd need both the new reactor and a better solution to high grade waste other than shoving it in drums and putting it somewhere the taxpayers won't notice. There are long term storage solutions but little desire to commit the resources to use them.

Re:Shoot it to the sun?

[ThatOneSDGuy]

The reprocessing canard has gone on long after plenty of information about it's future pitfalls has been in public record. See Here: http://spectrum.ieee.org/energ... "MOX is also three times as hot as spent uranium fuel, thanks to an accumulation of transuranic isotopes such as americium and curium, making it less fit for underground storage. Therefore, according to a 2000 consensus report on reprocessing prepared for France’s prime minister, spent MOX must cool for 150 years( in a water pool) before it can go into an underground waste repository... " A newer report : http://fissilematerials.org/li... says"Reprocessing has not led to a simplification or expedition of radioactive waste disposal;"..."France, which has the most extensive reprocessing and recycling program, does not attempt to recover the plutonium from the spent MOX fuel. In effect, it has exchanged the problem of managing spent fuel for the problem of managing spent MOX fuel, high level waste from reprocessing, plutonium waste from plutonium recycle, and eventually the waste from decommissioning its reprocessing and plutonium fuel fabrication facilities." As we are thinking about these issues and what the fire at WIPP means, we have no flip, easy answers. That doesn't mean the problems are insurrmountable, but we need to acknowledge their scope and work from reality.