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Up To 35,000 Gallons of Nuclear Waste Leak At Washington State Storage Site (rt.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Over the weekend, thousands of gallons of radioactive waste have leaked at a nuclear storage tank in Washington State. One worker called the leak "catastrophic." RT writes, "The Hanford Nuclear Reservation was originally constructed in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project." It produced plutonium for weapons, including the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. The U.S. Department of Energy started removing what was left in the tank in March when workers discovered leaked waste had reached a depth of 8.4 inches. The Department of Energy calls the leak "anticipated," posing no threat to the public. Mike Geffre, the worker who discovered the leak, told King5 News, "This is catastrophic. This is probably the biggest event to ever happen in tank farm history. The double shell tanks were supposed to be the saviors of all saviors (to hold waste safely from people and the environment)." The double-wall storage tank AY-102 has been slowly leaking since 2011. It wasn't until March of this year that the U.S. Department of Energy began pumping the waste leftover in the tank.
A slightly less breathless account is at the Seattle Times:
http://www.seattletimes.com/se...
A note to the poster of the original story, if you find yourself citing Russia Today as the primary source you should probably double check your facts.
I stole this Sig
Yes, the story was exaggerated in a way, and it should not have been. However, it still is a strong proof that existing nuclear plants are not safe.
You do know that this is not nuclear power related waste, which is pretty much limited to solid spent fuel rods, right? This is cold war waste from defense programs which didn't even bother to engineer any type of proper waste management. They had all sorts of nasty liquids that are much more problematic than spent fuel rods.
Of course it wasn't. But they built it with an outer hull because - you're not gonna believe this... wait for it - failures like this happen. If every man-made piece of technology functioned exactly as it was designed, there would be no fucking need for a second hull.
The presence of the second hull is what's known, in engineering parlance, as a FAILSAFE. Which is to say - if the first container fails, due to corrosion, damage, sabotage, etc., then the second hull preserves the SAFETY of the design even though part of the design has FAILED.
No, it sounds like it's operating explicitly as designed. If the first hull operated "as designed" with a 100% success rate, then there would be no need for the second hull.
Right, because engineers typically design containers in such a way that, should the first layer of the container be breached, the materials the container are designed to hold will react violently and explosively in the most dangerous way possible with the materials used in the second layer.
I can't wait to read about your lithium-coated thermos bottles, and Dynamite-lined chimney flues.
Your post is nothing but fucking alarmist rubbish.
Wait... If it's sealed, how does it dry out?
My guess is that since the space between the outer and inner walls of the tank is quite large a small leak could mean that the water has evaporated and is part of the air in that space. If I make further assumptions that in this space the humidity is controlled with desiccants to prevent rust then the water is contained in those desiccant materials.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
"But the inner tank was not designed to leak."
Of course it was, in a sense. All engineered systems have design lifetimes. The tank farms double-shells average around 30 years old. These tanks were not made to last "forever", unlike what the King-5 broadcast said.
It is a political failure, not a design failure. They were supposed to have been pumped dry many years ago. The permanent solution keeps getting postponed so we are stuck with various "temporary" solutions. This has been going on since before I came here after college (in 1979). We are making progress in cleaning things up, but it is very slow.
Yes I am an engineer. No I do not work at Hanford, but my friends and neighbors do.
"Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it." - George Santayana