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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
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.
"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'.
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.
Yes, under reported. Particularly the piece that the contractor (on their own) decided to change packing process/material which led to the cask overheating and causing the incident. Rank amateur, plain and simple.
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.
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.
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.
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...!
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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/...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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?