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Nuclear Waste Accident Costs Los Alamos Contractor $57 Million
HughPickens.com writes The LA Times reports that Los Alamos National Security, the contractor managing the nuclear weapons laboratory at Los Alamos, NM has been slapped with a $57-million reduction in its fees for 2014, largely due to a costly nuclear waste accident in which a 55-gallon drum packaged with plutonium waste from bomb production erupted after being placed in a 2,150-foot underground dump in the eastern New Mexico desert. Casks filled with 3.2 million cubic feet of deadly radioactive wastes remain buried at the crippled plant and the huge facility was rendered useless. The exact causes of the chemical reaction are still under investigation, but Energy Department officials say a packaging error at Los Alamos caused a reaction inside the drum. The radioactive material went airborne, contaminating a ventilation shaft that went to the surface giving low-level doses of radiation to 21 workers. According to a DOE report, the disaster at WIPP is rooted in careless contractors and lack of DOE oversight (PDF). "The accident was a horrific comedy of errors," says James Conca, a scientific advisor and expert on the WIPP. "This was the flagship of the Energy Department, the most successful program it had. The ramifications of this are going to be huge. Heads will roll."
The accident is likely to cause at least an 18-month shutdown and possibly a closure that could last several years. Waste shipments have already backed up at nuclear cleanup projects across the country, which even before the accident were years behind schedule. According to the Times, the cost of the accident, including likely delays in cleanup projects across the nation, will approach $1 billion. But some nuclear weapons scientists say the fine is an overreaction. "It was a mistake by an individual — a terrible mistake — and Washington now wants to punish a lot of people," says Conca. "The amount of radiation that was released was trivial. As long as you don't lick the walls, you can't get any radiation down there. Why are we treating this like Fukushima?"
The accident is likely to cause at least an 18-month shutdown and possibly a closure that could last several years. Waste shipments have already backed up at nuclear cleanup projects across the country, which even before the accident were years behind schedule. According to the Times, the cost of the accident, including likely delays in cleanup projects across the nation, will approach $1 billion. But some nuclear weapons scientists say the fine is an overreaction. "It was a mistake by an individual — a terrible mistake — and Washington now wants to punish a lot of people," says Conca. "The amount of radiation that was released was trivial. As long as you don't lick the walls, you can't get any radiation down there. Why are we treating this like Fukushima?"
because you're a bunch of drama loving media controlled schmucks.
They are.
Ie, minor fines, scapegoating, and under-reporting.
"It was a mistake by an individual..."
A with out good process, more individuals will be making more mistakes. Mistakes that "will approach $1 billion". There is a good reason people are going to walk up the chain and start blaming entire contracting companies, and hopefully start blaming the people that hired the contractors, and blame the people who wrote the processes that the contractors were supposed to follow.
If we can't get the storage of nuclear waste from weapons and power production right, then we're in a real pickle. A terrible radioactive pickle.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Really? Think about it in greater terms then keeping the lights in your house on. Renewable energy isn't going to take us to Mars. Until we harness the power of fusion, then fission is going to take us further into the future then coal and green.
How does massive government subsidies for renewables equate to capitalism? I think that's pretty much the opposite of capitalism.
What I'd like to see is a choice on your electricity bill where you could select which a method of power generation and pay the costs associated with it. By costs associated I mean all costs, be it the cost of backup power generation for renewable or the cost of clean-up operations for minor accidents like this.
If given such a choice I suspect nuclear would be around for a long time to come. I know I'd certainly go with the low price and consistent power supply that nuclear offers.
- Is why they're making comparisons to the semi recent, other comedy of errors that involved radiation release as a result of lax oversight.
"ignore the production costs" - what exactly do you think you're paying for when you buy renewables equipment ?
"ignore the environmental cost of the equipment" - the energy paybacks on all renewables techs are now very low. Concrete usage in wind turbines is not comparably significant (perhaps you're thinking of dams?). Yes, some producers of solar cells, mainly in China, have had bad waste management practices (like a lot of Chinese industry in general). But compared to the amount of power produced over the lifespan of the products, it's quite small.
Anyway, once again we see that the issue with nuclear is rarely lives - it's cost. Nuclear accidents tend to be accidents in slow motion. Excluding any pressure explosions or the like, they generally give you plenty of time to get away without profound health consequences. But the down side is that, being in slow motion, they just keep on going and going, and keep on costing money. They may be in slow motion, but they don't let you just ignore them. You can't just stay in an area with, say, contaminated water and keep drinking it as if nothing's wrong. You can't just keep operating a facility that's suffered an accident as if it never happened. You have to remedy them and it always costs a fortune. And the potential upper bounds on the costs are almost unlimited (picture, say, the cost of a worst-case scenario at Indian Point with winds pointed at NYC - the cost of even a couple week evacuation of NYC is almost unthinkable).
The nuclear industry has long suffered from a very unfortunate problem: a negative learning curve. With most technology, the longer you use and produce it, the cheaper it gets per unit. The nuclear industry has been one of the few industry where the costs have risen with time as people learn more problems in their designs and more risks that haven't been taken into account. And often the only way to address them is with brand new generations of reactors. Which is great, except that now you're starting your learning curve over from scratch, and your system is most commonly even more complicated to boot. It's really been a curse to the industry, and until it goes away, a true "nuclear rennaissance" is never going to occur. And no amount of government limitations on liability, no amount of municipalities forcing costs on to consumers, no amount of anything will really get the "take over the market" takeoff that proponents really want to see.
That's of course not the only problem nuclear has had. Another is the very long lead times on projects. The consequence is that you have to guess long in advance what the electricity market is going to be like. France suffered from this - they significantly overestimated what electricity consumption was going to be when they built most of their nuclear plants, leading to a generation capacity glut. This led to a lot of really inefficient uses of electricity and much higher investment costs than were necessary to meet demand.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
"So say goodby to nuclear power, its obsolete technology due to capitalism. The only thing keeping this alive is the power and money of those that invested and got rich with nuclear power over the last 50 years."
I feel the same way about manned space "exploration".
You are confused, this facility handles waste from weapons program, power production issue are irrelevant.
The smarter countries in the world are ramping up nuclear power production including bringing online new types of reactors.
Nuclear power is the future for over half the human race. There are some places where renewables make more sense.
It's not entirely clear in the summary, but the accident didn't happen at Los Alamos, it happened at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the $19b pilot plant that is at least in part a replacement for the Yucca Mountain plans.
Also, the original mistake that caused the chemical reaction? They used the wrong kind of cat litter to package the plutonium!
This is surprising to me, as I recall reading about plans for Canadian underground storage of nuclear waste back in the 90s. The plans then were to vitrify it - process it into a glass crystal - so that (a) Terrists couldn't get at it, and (b) it would be inert. I'm kind of amazed that they the DOE is happy with using steel drums and cat litter on their plutonium, though if it works (assuming you get the right kitty litter) then there's no reason to stop using it, I suppose.
Why are people commenting on nuclear power production - TFA was about nuclear weapon production, right? Or am I just confused?
Not to disagree with your points in general, but nuclear power isn't suffering from a negative learning curve so much as we're still using the same plants we built so long ago before we learned all this! Design a modern plant for "keep inevitable accidents cheap and easy to deal with" and you can get just that. Pebble bed, for all that it's a back-of-the-napkin "hey, what if" design, fixes a lot of the common problems (because the common problems are more about fuel/waste management), and is one of many approaches where the operators can't make it melt down no matter how incompetent. Pebble bed still has issues and new failure modes, but it shows the difference in kind we could have if we actually cared.
IMO, the real problem is we've culturally lost the patience for large infrastructure projects. People like rooftop solar because it doesn't require trust in some large organization (government or corporate) to do a job right.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You are ignoring the complicated parts - the bearings, the gears, the distribution channels (wind in particular doesn't occur where power lines already exist... The bearings and gears have to be very high reliability - close to that required of jet engines, and that calls for exotic materials. Solar requires rare earth mining. The environmental damage that has is rather significant.
Fission power is only expensive due to the excessive oversight imposed. If the coal power were required to be monitored for all the damage, cancers, and other health issues it causes in the same way, it too would be unusable.
The US Navy has already demonstrated cheap fission power capability.
Sure. If you pay for waste storage for 100000 years.
It didn't however get any more reliable - and that's the long term problem with renewables, not their cost per kw/h. So, even if renewable power were free, we'd still need to burn carbon and split atoms until we figure out how to store terawatts of energy.
Yes, the waste was from weapons production, but the facility it was stored in is a repository for all nuclear waste, including civilian nuclear waste. So this accident affects the civilian side as well as the miltary side. The plant is also over budget and extremely expensive ($19b for a pilot plant!).
$57 million penalty for what will cost taxpayers $1 billion + in the long run. they must have the same lobbyists as the banking industry.
If a single individual can make a mistake of this magnitude, without it being caught by checks and doublechecks, then the process itself is fragile and flawed. That is a systemic problem and deserves a systemic response.
ok new rule no homers or homer.
And we just need 2M to buy him out.
I was just in the Wieliczka Salt Mine, and that is literally what I did. :-(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
Koans and fables for the software engineer
"It was a mistake by an individual"
And the individual's supervisor and the person who trained the individual and the person who devised the individual's test after the training and the person who checked that the test was suitable and the person that did the risk assessment for the work the individual was doing and the person who checked the risk assessment for the work.
There are methods for making sure accidents don't happen, if those methods aren't followed then a lot of people are responsible.
You'd think they could get this stuff right after half a century of dealing with waste.
Could be worse... The Mafia's Deadly Garbage: Italy's Growing Toxic Waste Scandal
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
"The accident was a horrific comedy of errors," says James Conca, a scientific advisor and expert on the WIPP. "
What comedy, there's nothing funny about plutonium leaking. Once it got into the ventilation shafts it got into the air for us to breathe and improve our chances of getting cancer. So the whole so called isolation project was compromised.
But now that Germany is heavy on wind and must shut down its coal power plants, France no longer has much capacity glut.
Time to plan for a few more plants.
Haven't read all the linked articles through yet, but it's been mentioned in the past- and again in the articles- that one of the reasons for the explosion may have been the use of organic-based kitty litter(!) reacting badly with the materials being disposed of, and that the inorganic version should have been used.
One version I heard was that they changed the kitty litter formulation; this version suggests that they bought organic instead of inorganic kitty litter because of a typo.
Now, there's nothing wrong with using what amounts to kitty litter to do whatever it was being used for. If that does the job, fine.
But whichever of the cases described was true, a problem is that if the stuff they're buying is intended and sold as kitty litter, it's quite possible that the makers may feel at liberty to change the formulation in a way that doesn't effect its use as kitty litter, but massive alters its safety as a "nuclear waste disposal material".
If having organic matter in your kitty litter could inadvertantly turn the nuclear material into a form of radioactive explosive, then you should be damn sure that you're getting the inorganic formulation from a supplier that can guarantee that this is what you're getting. It won't be called "kitty litter" even if that's what- in effect- it is, and it'll probably cost a lot more, but the supplier will (or should be) in the s*** if they supply the wrong type, whereas are Los Alamos going to sue "Pets R Us" for causing a nuclear explosion even if they *did* inadvertantly put organic in an inorganic bag, or change the formulation with insufficient notice (or whatever)?
So this is why (e.g.) the military (for example) might pay a lot more for a given item than you or I might pay over the counter. That, and the fact that they're probably diverting the money to some dubious black ops...!
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
"ignore the production costs" - what exactly do you think you're paying for when you buy renewables equipment ?
Items that had their sales cost lowered by subsudies.
"ignore the environmental cost of the equipment" - the energy paybacks on all renewables techs are now very low.
Only because you ignore the environmental impact you shipped off to some poor nation.
In the long run, renewable is pretty much our ONLY choice, but lets not be fucking retarded and pretend they are the only choice for the immediate future. Theres a big picture to look at, not just your own agenda on how you want things to be.
Nuclear IS the right thing to use NOW. Solar and Wind hopefully in the near future, when we are more proficient with them. The physical foot print of these methods are currently untenable. Its not that they are eye sores, its that they will change their environment DRASTICALLY when implemented, so we have to implement them in a well thought out and efficient manner, engineering our climate by using their installation for more than JUST energy production.
The only real problem nuclear has is paranoid nut jobs acting like the world comes to an end over a minor incident. Fukushima WAS A MINOR ACCIDENT with practically ZERO consequence, regardless of how bad you want to blow it out of proportion. There has been more radiation spread from the energy (generated from coal) used to power the Internet based discussion about it than Fukushima itself released, its fucking ridiculous to treat it any differently. Yet you are.
Fukushima was a cluster fuck of preventable accidents and heads should roll for what happened when the plant survived the actual disaster only to succumbed to being unprepared for something that could have happened even WITHOUT a tsunami. We should bust our asses to ensure those faults do not happen again, but we should not run off on some ignorant tangent about using some other inferior (today) energy production method because people are afraid due to ignorance.
Nuclear can be MUCH safer, but retarded fear won't let anyone replace plants that are of known inferior designs with once that mitigate the problems passively. Everytime we see something like this happen, its to a plant that we should have decommission or in this case WAS about to be decommissioned in favor of a newer design.
You mention the very solution to the problem, then go off to stick your head in the sand out of fear that you don't understand it. You're going to have to deal with it eventually, how many disasters is it going to take before you finally realize that hiding from something you have to learn is the right idea?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
The huge (and they _are_ huge) cost of cleanup from places like Hanford has to be understood in the context under which it was created.
The people at Hanford were tasked with creating weapons to kill people, a million at a time. Given that criterion, is it any wonder that they weren't worried about a few salmon, or clean groundwater. They believed at the time that "Nuculer war, toe to toe with the Rooskies" was right around the corner, and they were dealing with the possibility of hundreds of millions of dead. All other reasons just didn't matter.
That turned out not to be the case, but hindsight is always so excellent.
Now, the pendulum has swung so far the other way, we want to clean up Hanford (as an example) well enough that we could build a school on the location. That doesn't seem like a realistic goal. As for a plutonium contaminated waste facility, I should point out that Los Alamos had quite the plutonium problem. They solved it by painting the walls coral - bright bleedin' orange - and then painting over with white paint. The rule was simple - if you see orange, call the safety people. It was (and is) not a perfect solution, but it was (and is) a workable one.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
Which tens of thousands of garbage dumps are already doing. It's no big deal.
Nuclear is the only viable option for base load if you want to reduce the trillions in costs from man made climate destruction. Problem with nuclear is ridiculous regulations. Problems with renewables are ridiculous subsidies and completely unrealistic expectations. Balance things out and nuclear would easily handle the next century until fusion is viable.
Or reprocessing.
The thing about radioactive material is that anything dangerously radioactive doesn't last long - the radiation comes from unstable elements decaying into stable ones, so the more radioactive something is the shorter the time period you need to worry about. Highly radioactive material is not a disposal problem - it mostly decays to background radiation levels in seconds or hours, maybe months on the outside. Yes, it blasts everything around it with radiation in the process - but leave it in a properly shielded "cooling room" for a while and you can then bury it in your vegetable garden without ill effects (well, aside from any chemical toxicity issues). At the other end of the scale, anything with a sufficiently long half-life (like nuclear fuel) will be around practically forever, but that's because it's decaying very slowly, and thus not producing very much radiation at all.
Moderately radioactive nuclear waste is the real danger - it's radioactive enough to be seriously dangerous, but not radioactive enough to decay quickly. Usually you're talking decades, maybe a few centuries for it to decay to background levels. This covers most of what we usually think of as "nuclear waste" - the fission products of a nuclear reaction. Still, bury it in a vault for a few centuries and the problem goes away.
So where do these 100,000 year numbers come from? Well, currently we do something really, *really* stupid: we don't just bury the radioactive stuff, we also include all the nuclear fuel that was still unused when the reaction slowed down enough that they decided to refuel. So now you've got a vault filled with decaying nuclear waste and lots and lots of nuclear fuel, which fissions when exposed to the radiation from the decaying waste, producing more fresh waste to replace the stuff that decays. Eventually you run out of fuel, but it takes you many thousands of years for that to happen.
The solution? Reprocessing. Separate the unused fuel from the waste before disposal. Then you've got new fuel and mid-level radioactive waste, neither of which is a long-term problem. Such reprocessing was actually the norm in the early days of nuclear energy, but then advances in uranium mining reduced the cost of fresh fuel to the point that reprocessing was no longer cost effective and we stopped doing it. Now granted, reprocessing is a nasty, dangerous process itself, but it's a process by which we can convert the basically unsolvable problem of long-term waste storage into something we can handle. And it's a technology that's been largely ignored for many decades, so it could probably be made far safer and more cost-effective, if there was a business reason to do so. What with fuel being only about 5% of the lifetime cost of a fission reactor, it's mostly poorly constructed economic incentives that keep us pushing massive costs onto future generations rather than simply solving the problem today for a comparative pittance.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Oh the horror, to have a capacity glut in a carbon-free energy source! If only we had that "problem" here in the US.
Well, we would have, if we'd nuclearized the grid in the 70's. Transportation, manufacturing, and heating would still be pumping carbon into the air, but we'd be quite a ways ahead of where we are now in dealing with it. We could have used the excess energy from the "capacity glut" to synthesize liquid fuels for transportation (like air travel), and/or to run electric mass transit and commuter cars. The additional experience and economies of scale in nuclear generation could have been applied to build out additional capacity to handle manufacturing and transport. Instead of environmentalists ranting about hair-shirt conservation measures while everyone else ignores them, we'd be making manageable adjustments to our energy production mix to ramp US emissions down to zero over the next few decades, and selling the technology to do it to the rest of the world. Oh, and hundreds of thousands fewer deaths from coal emissions and god-knows-how-many from fracking (the asbestos of the 21st century).
If only...
Well, for starters it helps to level the playing field against the massively subsidized fossil fuel industry. Revoke all the explicit subsidies, the tax breaks, and indemnification against environmental damages - everything that puts more money in the corporate coffers than if their industry weren't getting special treatment, and fossil fuels would look worse than most unsubsidized renewables.
Now if you'd care to talk about removing all those fossil-fuel subsidies, I'm all for it. But I don't think that's realistic in today's political climate - there's just too many powerful interests with their hand in the cookie jar, we're never getting the lid back on. And that means that the only way renewables can compete on their merits is if they are subsidized to a similar degree.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
WIPP is specifically for legacy weapons waste under DOE stewardship, not power plants.
As far as costs of fission plants, it comes from mining, fuel fabrication, plant construction... rife in billions in cost first-round passed to the ratepayers. "Too cheap to meter" is what they used to tell fools in the 1950s and 60s
"Cost over-runs" I meant
$137 billion. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
Continue your readings of the German Power System, there are notable problems, and several of the closed power plants had to keep open/reopen or not close. Seems as if the sun don't shine strong enough there when the most power needed. Same with the wind, the wind is too fast, and the turbines have to be braked/taken off line because of the flux of power. They have had to use the generators back-up generators to produce the power needed to brake the unit to prevent damage to the towers and the generators. As a feed in, its accepted, as a main power supply, its not acceptable yet.
Is this what slashdot has come to?
Fine. I'm out. I first got my /. account back in 1998 but this is the last bullshit I'll tolerate. This site is no longer relevant.
Not really - the Integral Fast Reactor program was developed to clean up both kinds of waste. It was killed by a progressive and corporatist alliance and the current administration refuses to talk with Branson about allowing commercial cleanup. Cheap clean power and nuclear waste cleanup (which needs doing regardless of cost) is purely a political problem. The market has been trying.
From my observation, people seem to think that "nuclear waste" is green glowing goo that turns people into mutants, and it's all the same no matter where it comes from. Thank Hollywood. Waste from nuclear power plants is basically expended fuel rods. They are radioactive, but the radioactivity is contained to an extent (the uranium oxide that is used as fuel is encased in a zirconium alloy). It's not something you'd want to hold in your hand obviously, but it's not *that* dangerous. These are typically stored in dry casks, that are filled with helium or some other inert gas, to keep chemical reactions from breaking down the zirconium alloy around the fuel pellets. The REALLY nasty nuclear waste (that is typically partially or mostly liquids and is stored in underground tanks at places like Hanford), does not come from nuclear power plants at all. It came from making plutonium for bombs. This stuff is nasty...not only is it extremely radioactive, but it's also *chemically* active (usually highly acidic due to nitric acid being used during the plutonium making process), and also mixed with all kinds of nasty toxic organic materials (another component of the plutonium making process is tributyl phosphate dissolved in kerosene). Take that, mix with nitric acid, mix with all kinds of radioactive salts, and you get something that is very nasty. The process is detailed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Although keep in mind, PUREX is the latest process, before it was developed there were earlier messier processes that created more waste, and in places like Hanford all this stuff gets mixed together, and who knows what chemical reactions take place in there. But most people don't really know any of this, they only know of "nuclear waste" that Hollywood has told them about.
The German nuclear power plants were scheduled to be progressively closed since around 2000. The Fukushima overreaction was indeed stupid, but the lack of it would have had hardly any effect on the German electricity mix evolution.
Ezekiel 23:20
Renewable energy isn't going to take us to Mars
Actually, methane synthesis using renewable electricity is quite conceivable.
Ezekiel 23:20
There's a pebble-bed reactor in Jülich, Germany. Guess what, it didn't work as planned, and to make matters worse, it took quite some time to realize that it had not worked as planned. Basically the scope of the disaster was only apparent once the reactor was shut down. One issue is that the reactor radioactively contaminated the ground water beneath it. To what extent is still unknown, because the reactor is also much more radioactive than expected, so dismantling the reactor had to be postponed and with the reactor still standing, a full assessment of the contamination is impossible. This was only a small, scientific reactor, but the list of accidents, management and operative problems and attempts to deny hazards which have been documented already reads like a laundry list of problems so typical of the nuclear industry. The commercial version THTR-300 in Hamm, Germany, was a complete boondoggle. It was an economic disaster for the consortium of companies which were involved in operating the reactor, mainly because a long list of technical problems prevented profitable operation and caused damage which made long-term operability highly unlikely.
The nuclear industry and its fanboys have a habit of deferring safe and cheap nuclear power to future designs, which will make the problems we have with currently operative designs go away. But whenever the future turns into the present, nuclear power still isn't safe and certainly not cheap. Of course then there are new new designs which will make nuclear power safe and cheap, for real this time. Just make sure you keep up with what has been tried and failed already.
it's also *chemically* active (usually highly acidic due to nitric acid being used during the plutonium making process)
Wouldn't that be rather trivial to fix, by stirring in some baking soda?
Not as trivial as you might think. Acid/base reactions generate heat. In the presence of heat, nitric acid and tributyl phosphate can form a dangerously explosive polymer called red oil. That's just one example of "what can possibly go wrong". Also, keep in mind that there are *millions of gallons* of this stuff. Neutralizing it all with baking soda would take a LOT of baking soda, and also generate that much more waste.
That turned out not to be the case, but hindsight is always so excellent.
The irony is that some percentage of their goal will be achieved no matter what they intended. It's a fools errand that leads them to believe that they have control over these materials for the geological timeframes that they will exist while they decay.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Why are people commenting on nuclear power production - TFA was about nuclear weapon production, right? Or am I just confused?
It is convenient for those with an anti nuke power agenda to conflate the two. Accuracy and truth are secondary, and the ignorance of the media makes it easy. Yes, this has nothing to do with commercial nuclear energy.
While the Fukushima cost has been identified at $137 Billion we need to understand that the explosion has rendered the entire underground facility essentially too contaminated with radiation to be safely worked in
It is also a case of penny wise and pound foolish
In a push to 'save money' DOE decided against the use of 12-foot concrete explosion isolation wall, which had been installed in Panel 1, 2 and 5 within the underground structure
Now, because of the explosion, not only storage area 6, 7 become contaminated, the entire huge underground structure has become too 'hot' and one doesn't have to 'lick the wall' to be massively irradiated
BTW, talk is cheap. Instead of uttering 'lick the wall' that Jame Conca should volunteer himself to work inside the gigantic underground structure - and whether he ends up licking the wall or not, that's all up to him !
Fusion, The Pipie Dream of the Present - the answer to problems of the past, just like fission was to coal.
The problems aren't self-contained. They are systemic, and they are tied to the economics and ecological effects of mankind in general. Humanity is constructing ever larger and more complex problems by ignoring its own geometric growth rate, the increasing marginal economic cost of resource extraction, food production and land use requirements. Especially as theses increasing needs impact the rest of life on the planet.
Cheap energy may sustain industrial production, but the demands of modern living from the growing percentage of an increasing global population are oustripping the planet's ability to sustain the human desires because we continue to underestimate the negative aspects of our industrial behavior on global health, in general.
Energy production costs and techniques should be structured responsibly so as to provide incentives to rein in our population growth as well as reducing carbon stress on the oceans, atmosphere and climate.
Some fission products such as strontium 90 are pretty radioactive (and short lived). Transuranics from partially burned (non-fast) reactions also can be very radioactive and short lived, but most are alpha emitters, so your dead skin will block that (don't eat or breathe them, though). The actual fuel (uranium, at least) you could carry around in your bare hands, but most people don't because non-oxidized uranium reacts with water (so if you marred the uranium oxide coating and touched the uranium, water from your hand may cause the uranium to catch fire). On the positive side, many of the fission byproducts have uses (like medical devices) and are separated from the waste, so yeah, most of the stuff in the casks is pretty benign.
Uses waste for fuel. Go for it... Don't throw it in a leaky hole in the ground
The shutdown was accelerated due to Fukushima and forced reopening several coal plants and building several more. Even worse, many of these were lignite coal, which is the tar sands of coal (polluting and the worst energy for volume).
Because we're not only dealing with a radiation leak here, we're dealing with an airborne contaminant that just happens to be the most toxic substance known to Man?
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I don't know whether kitty litter was involved in the accident or not, but there is a reason why someone might use kitty litter instead of something purposely made: some kitty litter is 100% clay. It contains nothing else. 100% clay kitty litters are often advertised as such and the manufacturers go to great lengths to state that the product has nothing added to it. I know this, not because I have a cat, but because I have often used kitty litter for the substrate in fish tanks. It is by far the cheapest and easiest to get form of clay.
I can well understand that someone might realize that this is the cheapest way to buy clay and buy it for other purposes. If your suspicion is correct, then there is a *massive* problem if the people ordering and receiving the kitty litter don't know that it is clay. They need to understand what they are doing and if they receive something other than pure clay, they can't use it. In other words, buy buying the cheaper clay in the form of kitty litter, they have pushed the responsibility from the manufacturer to themselves in terms of making sure they have something that will work for their task. Personally, I don't think that's necessarily a bad idea because you often have more control over training/oversight than you do with 3rd parties. However, if this was indeed the problem, then clearly they have taken the savings but not done anything on their side to ensure that they have the right material. That would not be a mistake with a single individual, but rather a systemic error.
Of course, if not for the weird political issues, that plutonium would be bound for the core of a reactor and not being hastily shoved in a can and put in a special warehouse.
The problem is not at this point any radiation risk. The problem is DOE is INCOMPETENT. An accident cannot be tolerated in nuclear materials handling. No matter what you say about how great and safe nuclear power CAN BE, the fact is, give the actual mechanisms of management and implementation, IT'S NOT. In this case, it may have been a relatively minor mistake, but minor mistakes can be catastrophic, and THAT'S WHY NUCLEAR POWER IS A BAD IDEA. Either government or corporate bureaucracies are completely incompetent at managing it. Do you want a BP running a nuclear power station? You remember, the BP that was responsible for the Deepwater Horizon disaster?
We aren't even treating Fukushima like Fukushima. News blackout, secret censorship, counter argumentation by Government funded scientist as to "harmlessness".
Hint, there is no safe level of radiation and the true levels of cantamination are unkown because thery are not being measured globaly or reported, for that matter.
Besides you need a degree in Nuclear Physics to truly understand radiation exposures and radioactive breakdown byproducts.
Which raises the question: why aren't all civillian reactors of the same design as the ones they put in Naval vessels? It seems like they have a much better safety track record...
Certainly then, you can us the market prices to dispose of high level nuclear waste and to purchase insurance sufficient to protect the property owners to the affected radii of the various levels of accidents?
Otherwise, what you are really saying is that it's cheap if the government indemnifies the nuclear power industry and shoves the risk down the throats of property owners, who will never recover their losses if a real accident occurs.
As well as allowing the industry to leave the waste sitting above ground forever, potentially wiping out large swaths of land and/or humanity under various, very plausible scenarios that may occur on timescales that cover millions of years. But of course, you neglect responsibility for those possibilities.
I don't support neglecting the "external" costs of coal power production, either.
Yeah, it really is simple, huh? Now all you have to do it get humans to do it all correctly.
And we're going to remove government indemnification for nuclear power plants too, right? It's simple really--get rid of most of the regulations, in exchange for the requirement that the plants purchase private insurance to a degree acceptable to the nearby PROPERTY OWNERS!
Yeah, it'll be real cheap.
Central Europe has been lignite-powered since time immemorial. That's a simple matter of local geology. But the new coal plants are vastly more efficient and capable of following the load with much more flexibility. This is why old coal plants are actually being shut down in Germany, instead of reopened, as you claim, because they don't match the current requirements.
Ezekiel 23:20
I disagree. Nuclear waste is waste, toxic radiation is radiation. The fact most nuclear waste is military waste, is overshadowed by the problems that commercial nuclear technology is old, expensive, and still lacking infrastructure after 50 years.
As this spill demonstrates, industrial (and military) waste is handled by commercial enterprises with lax work procedures, under even laxer waste disposal laws. These accidents happen often in the USA. This accident is getting coverage because, this time it's nuclear waste.
The problem with nuclear waste is it's got the anti-Midas touch. If I get road grease on my hands while fixing my car, I can wash my hands in the sink. Which makes the water going into the drain dirty. But once it goes through the sewage treatment plant, it's clean. But anything you do to remediate nuclear waste, results in more nuclear waste. Because it's the isotopes that are bad. You can't just burn it like dioxins. Eventually you end up stuff that is low enough concentration that you can't afford to process it any further, that stuff needs to be buried somewhere. Most likely the waste being stored is such low level 'scrap'
I suspect this is why nuclear reprocessing is economically crap. The cheapest way to deal with the worthless radio-isotopes in spent fuel rods is to leave them in the fuel rod. Cheaper to just mine and process more uranium than to figure out what to do with a buttload chemical soup contaminated with Strontium 90.
That's not actually the case. Unlike the grease on your hands (or in the water), the radioactive waste will eventually stop being radioactive all by itself.
It doesn't matter if the container used to re-process fuel becomes contaminated with radiation, it's going to be used to process more waste. Let it glow!
As for the soup, precipitate the Sr90 and dispose of it.
The U.S. doesn't re-process in orser to keep countries lioke India (oops) or Pakistan (oops again) from diverting it to become nuclear powers.
Beyond that, the more modern processes leave the actinides in the fuel making it worthless for a bomb but just fine for a reactor.
Consider, when sites contaminated with Sr90 and cesium cool off and become safe for people, the chemically contaminated superfund sites will still be off-limits.
Perhaps we should (validly) measure things like PCBs, DDT, and Dioxins in terms of half-life. That would put things in perspective.
I've been pointing out lately the difference between and photo-voltaic plant, and a nuclear one. Both require a huge initial investment. But maintenance of a the solar plant mostly involves rednecks driving around to clean dust of the panels.
Is this a metaphorical solution that I'm not understanding, or an actual solution to a problem that I don't understand. I'm presuming the problem is radiation contamination, but I'm not understanding how deteriorating white paint that shows orange paint underneath is a viable detection solution.
In this case, the earth is blasted out of its orbit around the Sun into outer space.
^your generalizations help validate my point. You probably don't even know the differences between the weapons program waste challenges and spent nuclear fuel.
Can you imagine the horror show that would result from inadequate oversight? We insist on using for-profit companies to build our nuclear reactors - companies who make more money the more corners they cut. Companies whose management is not answerable to the people in any way. Companies that won't develop contingency plans because it's "too expensive", and without proper regulation there are no consequences.
We have a private company operating our water service here. They're awful. They have a stranglehold on the distribution infrastructure, so they can pretty much do whatever the fuck they want, legal or not. They cut corners and we had an 11-day boil order as a result. One of their managers was convicted of a crime and went to prison for tampering with water samples to make them appear cleaner than the water actually was. And that's just the stuff we know about. They probably get away with that kind of thing all the time; after all, it's only a crime if you get caught.
So, in short, private industry can't be trusted to build and operate the plants safely, and there would be Tea Party rioting in the streets if any of the plants were nationalized. These make nuclear power not viable in the USA. As far as environmental impact goes, the waste generated by producing solar panels doesn't require storage by the lowest bidder and isn't radioactive for thousands of years.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Sure, if you wanted to simultaneously drive forward both renewable adoption and better reactor design. The US Navy has after all been demonstrating extremely robust and reliable reactors for decades operating in vessels specifically designed to have people try to destroy them. Granted they don't have anywhere near the capacity of a typical landbound reactor, but a cluster of such reactors would compare favorably to your typical coal-fired power plant.
But why should nearby property owners get a disproportionate say? If we want power we have to build power plants somewhere. How about we give them a choice - we can build either a nuclear reactor or a coal-fired plant, their choice. If they have half a brain they'll go for the reactor - only spectacular levels of incompetence will result in any problems, whereas a coal plant will start causing localized environmental and health problems from the day it starts operating.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
This sounds like a canary/coal mine solution... but I also don't understand the chemistry of it. Does anybody know why a radiation leak would cause an orange-then-white painted wall to show white when there isn't a leak and orange when there is?
Could we just bomb somebody with this shit, preferably somebody we do not like?
I can only guess that the walls were radioactive and they "solved" the problem by encapsulating them with paint. Ironically, it'd probably be the one place where using lead-based paint would be a good thing...
(Actually, I bet they used lead-based bright orange paint to encapsulate the radioactive stuff, then non-lead white paint to encapsulate the lead!)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I am sure scrum team doing it properly can deliver the solution next sprint.....
This is probably one of the few intelligible posts on this thread. I too think that the question is badly formulated and problems are not what we think they are. It is not accidents but waste, it is not energy production but energy production and very important weapons production that stimulated development of fission plants, it is not either nuclear or coal but rather the question of how humanity affects its environment. So far the raise and fall of civilizations followed the path of: develope, shine, destroy environment beyond repair and if move to another place is possible - move and rearrange elsewhere. Problem with this is that we live now everywhere. That is typical of any living organism really - if conditions are good - develop and occupy as much as is possible. Overpopulation causes collapse usually. Sometimes renewal. I hope for the later although I know that usually the former happens.
The problems with the system are obvious but I think it's hilarious that a contractor was finally held responsible for fucking up. I mean, they lost 90% of their contract price for this year because of this accident. Hopefully, this would make them act more properly now that their bottom line is at risk.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Are you trying to say that the French are doing it incorrectly? Perhaps you should enlighten them on how to do it properly since you know so much more than everyone else about how to do it.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
If you want to remove all the Fossil Fuel subsidies, you should also remove all taxes on gasoline, after all, other power doesn't have to pay these taxes.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
nitric acid and tributyl phosphate can form a dangerously explosive polymer called red oil.
Which, in concentrated form, can form a black hole that can devour a whole planet.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
Things like this make me wonder how "scientists" can report that nuclear energy is the safest/best option with the greatest return.
There was an article here (a few days ago) or in the news about this and how dirt/dangerous other energy sources are to the earth but I can't find the snippet now
Sure, we're going to need to do that eventually anyway as electric vehicles become more popular. How do you feel about a mass and mileage tax instead? We have to pay for road maintenance somehow, and it's only fair that payment reflects usage, at least roughly. And lest you raise the "but everyone benefits from interstate trade routes" argument, yes, they do. And they pay for that benefit in having the transportation taxes factored into the cost of goods at the store.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Yeah. Also, unfortunately, "reprocessing" gets a bad rap due to PUREX which, while better than no reprocessing at all from a waste perspective, is still pretty bad.
The pyroprocessing process used as part of the IFR design had great potential - there was a good chance that it would have been able to fuel the USA for 1-2 centuries using only the existing LWR reactor waste stockpiles. The waste from the IFR would be incredibly dangerous - but only for 100-200 years and MUCH lower in volume compared to the amount of energy extracted than current LWR waste. (Which is something like 90-95% usable fuel still...) Such waste could be much more easily diluted using vitrification for storage on the order of 100-200 years.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
As your comment demonstrates you have no clue as to the issues. The differences between nuclear weapons waste and nuclear power waste are night and day. to lump shows a large amount of ignorance.
"Why should nearby property owners get a disproportionate say?"
Obviously, because risk and property damage potential are roughly inversely proportional to radial distance from the nuclear plant.
How about we give them a choice - ..."
In a civil society, there really is no choice about giving property owners a choice. For protecting life, liberty, and property is the only legitimate purpose of governance, no matter how that is implemented. Property owners out to some cutoff radius should be allowed to submit a vote (weighted inversely with radius) to permit or veto the construction of a nuclear plant.
This is the true point of democracy--geographically contiguous groups of property owners should be able to democratically administer the rights to use property in certain ways within their region. Democracy is illegitimate if it is voting on how much to take from a minority group at gunpoint, to give to a majority group, while a criminal gang gets to take a cut off the top. That is the "democracy" we practice now.
Coal plants are actually in a different category. Since they continuously pollute, they should have to pay royalties to the collective owners of the atmosphere. That's basically everyone on the planet, though there is a case to be made that due to circulation patterns, the payment should be weighted according to the statistical distribution of pollutants.
People should be issued a share of the atmosphere at birth. They may be traded freely once one reaches adulthood.
ALL pollutant emitters should have to pay, both individual and large scale. So the power plant will pay, that cost will be included in my bill. It will make the power expensive. Thus, a true market price (with externalities accounted for) will exist. Renewables and nuclear can compete on this basis.
However, the waste disposal for nuclear MUST also be accounted for!
When I buy gas, interestingly, the oil co. should owe no royalties. Since I will be the one doing the burning. So I will pay, reflected in the purchase price. But the royalties will partly get paid back to myself. This is fine. It also results in a true market price for the procurement and effective disposal of the pollutants resulting from burning the fuel. This will make it more expensive. But the royalties are not taxes, so they DON'T go to politicians who will squander them. They will go right back to the consumers.
This is fascinating because, some of the royalty cost cancels itself, but the increase in the effective market price of the fuel remains valid nonetheless! Government can't accomplish this. But they have a place in administering it--only to the extent of formalizing the definition and judicial administration of the property rights.
Since the ground is owned by government, if you don't pay to get it out, then you won't be allowed to get it out. Fairly simple.
if you pay for extraction, then that's claimed to be a tax, which you are against. Fairly simple too.
Some interesting thoughts.
One tangential point to think about though:
>For protecting life, liberty, and property is the only legitimate purpose of governance
Life and liberty are all well and good, but wealth (property) facilitates the accumulation of more wealth, which means government-backed property rights will almost inevitably lead to extreme wealth concentration if there's not some other mechanism put in place to counteract it. By not including a fourth, mediating influence of some kind in your "only legitimate purposes" you are implicitly stating that such extreme wealth concentration is a legitimate purpose of government.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.