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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?
Don't go green.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
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.
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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The dumbass who wrote "jet fuel" is you.
The word "jet" does not appear in the summary nor does it appear in the article. Nobody else is referring to kitty litter as jet fuel. Just you.
It's worse than two kinds of concrete.
It's like approving concrete originally, then switching to bamboo fiber mash. Yes, someone should have known better, as they're not even close to the same thing.
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.
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!
This is unrelated to "nuclear energy" and was for bombs.
Learn to love Alaska
The nuclear accident is now known by the operation handle: Katpiss Evergreen
First off, this is from the weapons program, not power. Also, not all waste is created equal. Drums are only used for low level stuff - think lab coats, glassware, tools, etc. that at some point might have come into contact with radioactive stuff and so can have trace residue on it. This is *NOT* spent fuel. If you had cared to read the original articles, you'd know that the incident was the first in this facility's 15 year history, wasn't their fault, was extremely small, was immediately contained and rootcaused so that corrective measures could be taken. From where I'm standing, this is a good example of safety working as intended. Unlike your average coal ash spill.
Don't take my word for it, look at who submitted this article, as well as a string of negative nuclear related headlines going back quite some time, for long stretches almost on a daily basis. You'll find its good ole mdsolar. So yes, I'll remind the community of it, because some folks don't really pay attention. I guess that includes yourself.
I don't drive the content toward anything on this site. I do have my opinions, and I am very up front about them.
Anything I 'discredit' is done without relation to the submitter, his credibility, or lack thereof. I speak to the content of the article and the subject matter. I did not dismiss anything in this article. In the past I have shown how some of the articles submitted by the same person are misleading or dead wrong and many points, and directly from sources that are not credible. This article isn't one of those, but it was one of many written on this event, but one of the few to repetitively use the term "dump".
If you read the comments, these headlines breed confusion. Many people associate this type of waste with nuclear power fuel waste, and its a very different animal. Its a clarification that is perfectly reasonable for someone to make.
So, be specific. What truth don't I like that I am discrediting? Or did you just throw out that accusation with nothing to back it up? I certainly backed up mine.
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.)
It is not an Ad Hominem falacy to point out that the person in question posts many negative nuclear related articles.
From your own quote:
"An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man" or "to the person"[1]), short for argumentum ad hominem, is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument."
It would be ad-hom to say "ignore this because mdsolar has bad morals". It is not ad-hom to say "beware, mdsolar is obsessed with nuclear energy".
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Beginning over 30 years ago, activities involving separating americium (Am) from old weapons materials generated a moderate amount of transuranic waste contaminated with americium (Am), plutonium, uranium and minor amounts of other radionuclides, and containing various metal-nitrate salts (strong oxidizers), such as (Mg,Ca)(NO3)2 with minor amounts of Fe, Na and K. When dewatered, these hot evaporator bottoms were poured onto a tray, vacuum dried, flashed crystallized, rinsed with cold water and put in bags, where they sat for 30 years.
[...snip...]
It was recommended sometime later that inorganic kitty litter made from silicate minerals be added as a sorbent (widely used in radiochemistry as well as the home litter box), but also to dissipate heat and generally mitigate auto-oxidation reactions of the kind we think occurred in these drums in WIPP. Anhydrous citric acid (a reducer) was used to bring the pH down if over-adjusted.
For reasons perhaps related to good intentions, or merely related to dust generation, the inorganic kitty litter was replaced by organic wheat-based litter early on in the process. There were a few other components of not much import in the drums, but additional organic components just added more fuel.
Some decisions regarding these additives are vague and not attributable to a real chemist.
So it seems it was a case of a well meaning idiot making stupid decisions.