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Organic Cat Litter May Have Caused Nuclear Waste Accident
mdsolar (1045926) writes in with a story about how important buying the right kind of kitty litter can be. "In February, a 55-gallon drum of radioactive waste burst open inside America's only nuclear dump, in New Mexico. Now investigators believe the cause may have been a pet store purchase gone bad. 'It was the wrong kitty litter,' says James Conca, a geochemist in Richland, Wash., who has spent decades in the nuclear waste business. It turns out there's more to cat litter than you think. It can soak up urine, but it's just as good at absorbing radioactive material. 'It actually works well both in the home litter box as well as the radiochemistry laboratory,' says Conca, who is not directly involved in the current investigation. Cat litter has been used for years to dispose of nuclear waste. Dump it into a drum of sludge and it will stabilize volatile radioactive chemicals. The litter prevents it from reacting with the environment. And this is what contractors at Los Alamos National Laboratory were doing as they packed Cold War-era waste for shipment to the dump. But at some point, they decided to make a switch, from clay to organic. 'Now that might sound nice, you're trying to be green and all that, but the organic kitty litters are organic,' says Conca. Organic litter is made of plant material, which is full of chemical compounds that can react with the nuclear waste. 'They actually are just fuel, and so they're the wrong thing to add,' he says. Investigators now believe the litter and waste caused the drum to slowly heat up 'sort of like a slow burn charcoal briquette instead of an actual bomb.' After it arrived at the dump, it burst."
It should be noted that this waste is from cold war era defense programs, and not used commercial nuclear fuel which is much easier to handle and store. It should also be noted that although the writers make every effort to call the WIPP a "dump" in order to conjure up images of a simple landfill, it is actually an underground geological (saltbed) monitored storage facility created for storage of radioactive waste.
Unlike chemical from many industries that are dumped in many places with much less control, this is an example of quick recognition and response to a problem. Cold war nuclear waste comes in all kinds of nasty liquid, solid, and semi-solid forms and will continue to bring challenges as the slow cleanup slog continues.
Of course, this slashdot submission is one of an ongoing number of agenda driven submissions that intends to obfuscate the challenges of cold ware era defense program neglect with commercial nuclear power. Fortunately, most slashdot readers pick up on the obvious.
You still have a bad cert, Slashdot. What's going on?
Dumbass Causes Nuclear Waste Accident With Organic Cat Litter
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
Heard it on the radio a couple of days ago.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Don't go green.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
"organic kitty litters are organic" is stating the obvious. Just saying.
It is absolutely an agenda submission. It even looks to me like it's trying to be critical of the organic movement. I'll reserve my opinion of that kind of thing, but in this case, "organic" means what it actually means, not the hippie non-term it has become. I'd rather they say it was because they switched from clay-based to plant-based kitty litter. The risks of this should have been obvious to someone working with radioactive disposal.
This must have been very poor quality kitty litter. Given what my evil black cat puts into her cat box, the highest of quality in kitty litter must be obtained to prevent a similar explosion.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
Organic cat litters are really just jet fuel? What? The stupid is strong with this one.
I don't think my cat gives a shit whether their bathroom is organic, it's a frickin' toilet.
I'm green with being sick about this having anything to do with "being green." For a NUCLEAR WASTE contractor to not read the ingredients and know the difference is what the news is here.
"Stupid hippie crap."
Jet fuel would be a hydrocarbon. Organic kitty litter would be essentially cellulose, a carbohydrate.
Both are fuels, in that they will combust when heated, unlike clay.
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...dem radioactive urine-packin' kittehz.
Yeah Kittehz!
http://24.media.tumblr.com/ab9...
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Just because a material has a everyday name, it doesn't mean that the original specification didn't have a chemical/mechanical/biological/radiological/whatever reason for specifying it.
If all the material property requirements were met with a commonly available product that didn't require an expensive supply chain, then that's great.
HOWEVER...
I suspect that originally somewhere in the nuclear disposal system, a group identified the need, a solution was found and a materiel was specified. Along the line or through the years, the REASON for that specification was lost to the end of the purchasing chain and the poor sod who orders the stuff was given a directive to "buy sustainably" and substituted the new material without being aware of the original intent.
That person probably wasn't even been aware of the use of the material - they may have though it was used in the kennels for the guard dogs. It's a nuclear material disposal site. Need to know is important. (1) The suppler wouldn't have known, either.
There's lots of complaints of expensive procedures and materials(2), but this is a perfect example of the need for a formal supply chain system with provable provenance. You may BUY a commonly available kitty litter to fulfill the order, but what arrives in the sacks will have to match the specification sheet.
1. Yes, this is irony. The accident may have been prevented if the purchasing officer knew what it was for. Then again, maybe not.
2. Ferrous hammers are a bad idea around strong magnetic fields. If you're in a lab with a MRI or similar and lots of delicate equipment, a hammer to undo the dog on a vacuum chamber had better be a very special hammer. The kind that you can buy today for less than a hundred bucks, but in the 60's had to be engineered from scratch. Thank someone else's R&D for the fact you can buy a (nearly) chemically inert, non-ferrous, non-sparking hammer for a pittance.
slashdot has become bloated with ads.. and why does it keep refreshing , that's even more annoying than the ads? AND when I try to login I get an untrusted security certificate warning .
Not to mention, it wasn't the kitty litter that caused this.
Newsflash: If you work with nuclear waste, don't go around changing the recipes without asking your boss!
it lags all of the other pages I have open. and when I close it it takes a good 20seconeds .
Jesus fuck. This is the kind of thinking that makes teenagers try to use a Coca-Cola douche as plan B birth control.
And the best part, cat litter is dirt cheap! You can get a big drum of the stuff at Wal-Mart for next to nothing. And it's got a fresh scent, too!
You are welcome on my lawn.
The nuclear accident is now known by the operation handle: Katpiss Evergreen
my resignatioN when done playing
What a joke, the system of disposable was the cause. Who is the they in the article that made the decision? Why did they make it? What oversight was missing or not followed? Oh never mind, organic causes nuclear waste accidents!
I'm getting sick of people "calling out" agendas every time they see a piece of news they don't like, even when it's a factual report, written in neutral terms, is newsworthy. No, forget about that, there's no shortage of bad-mouthed people ready to jump at something no matter what the article contained.
Keep such insipid rants for youtube comments and comment sections on newspaper sites, please.
Your autocorrect eyes aren't too far off. One common way to make small rockets is sugar as fuel. The sugar is mixed with your choice compound that provides the oxygen.
Let that organic material sit around for a while and airborne yeast will turn some of it into dragster fuel - ethanol.
If this is /. then why is it is so frickin' hard to update a CA? News for nerds..brought to you buy lazy BOFH?
Have gnu, will travel.
When you're dealing with radioactive waste, going green is bad.
Too often you end up making an idiot like the parent.
The "organics" did not react with the "nuclear" part of the "nuclear waste", they reacted with the 1% acid that was still in the solution.
A pure chemical reaction.
(Made complicated/ugly by the combustion products carrying away small amounts of nuclear waste, for sure.)
The litter prevents it from reacting with the environment. And
Seriously?
In other news, Slashdot editors are so shit, we put "And" after a FULLSTOP!
Go Slashdot, fuck everyone who went to English lessons and get paid for it in the process!
Epic.
Not sure any of you numpties get it! Making a *change* to a 'product' that mixes with radioactive material should never ever happen. This is basic process engineering 101. How the F can anyone make a change to a known working procedures that identifies, material type right down to the chemical content with a 'store purchase'.
This is a complete failure of basic engineering validation. People should be in jail for gross incompetence or negligence.
Moreover, the article is worded as though the problem is the use of organic material, rather than merely the wrong material. To be clear, the wrong material could just as well be non-organic.
"Organic" isn't even an issue here, but merely an unreleated detail. Yet, the article puts "organic" in the spotlight as if it had something meaningful to do with the outcome.
It is high time for the molten thorium kitten reactors that can convert nearly all of the 'kitty litter' into fuel. Listen to them purr as they turn all this into pure energy.
It like the Government version of Mentos in Diet Coke.
Why in the world would these contractors be buying this stuff from a pet store? I would think that they would test several brands of litter and see which one worked best, then order them direct from the manufacturer with a contract stating that the formulation would be exact to that used in the tests. With all the money being sunk into nuclear cleanup (wasn't their a story just a few days ago about a site requiring $1 Billion a year just to stabilize the facility?) it sounds like some are cutting corners to pocket even more taxpayer money.
The whole point of organic cat litter is it DOESN'T go to a landfill. It can be composted and used to grow things.
"Organic cat litter" doesn't cause nuclear accidents. Brain dead Nuclear Industry / Dept. of Energy G-men who think recycled newspaper can block gamma particles do.
Claiming that kitty litter caused this is rather like say the Tacoma Bridge collapse was caused by Wind.
The failure in both cases was Human error!
So, if we get too many of these "containers" together, and they burst/explode, will we have a Nuclear Rocket Motor?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
(apologies to Space: 1999)
if (!sig) { printf("Signature Unavailable\n"); }
Compare and contrast this to the absolute clusterfuck in West Virigia earlier this year.
People had to have water shipped in for weeks. The company did it went 'bankrupt' (even though it's just another company with ties to the Koch brothers).
I heard about it for a few weeks and then nothing much on main media. That spill probable affected more people and animals than this 'spill' ever will.