Slashdot Mirror
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
"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'.
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...!
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
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.
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.