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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?"
"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
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.
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.
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.
$137 billion. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
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.