Slashdot Mirror
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.
Too bad we didn't even try to manage it back in the day.
3500 gallons (not 35,000) of water than contained some nuclear salts (not uranium, or anything else normally referred to as nuclear waste). People who break into the restricted area should refrain from licking the ground for a few decades. Everyone else has nothing to worry about.
And it isn't surprising that a facility 70 years old, that can't get permission to rebuild, refurbish, or even empty because of ignorant Greenies, is falling apart. Maybe Greenpeace will allow the facility to build new holding tanks now, right?
Nah.
A slightly less breathless account is at the Seattle Times:
http://www.seattletimes.com/se...
Oh, the fools! If only they'd built it with 6,001 hulls! When will they learn?
-- Fry
C'mon....mdsolar we know it is you!
It leaked out of the inner tank and was contained by the outer tank. As designed.
Catastrophic?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Estimates place the leak between 3000 and 3500 gallons. They've been pumping out the tank, which held 800,000 gallons at one point, and 20,000 gallons are left in it. There are now about 8 inches that have leaked between the layers of the inner tank and outer tank, the vast majority since they started pumping.
So they stopped pumping, to figure out how to deal with that.
I will reserve that term when 1) I learn what is the content of the tank 2) the amount of becquerel released outside the plant if any. Without both those info it could be between catastrophic and "meh".
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
More like "What do you expect from the Russian press?"
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
RT -> Russia Today, a well known Kremlin owned propaganda source.
From TFA:
Sources told KING the disturbance caused by the pumping must have exacerbated the leak: essentially blowing a hole in the aging tank allowing the material to leak more quickly into the outer shell... Tank AY-102 is one of 28 double-shell tanks at Hanford
If I'm reading this right, they have a double-shell tank and then inner shell is leaking material into the outer shell. That's not good, but it doesn't sound like the material has escaped from the tank. The outer shell is there as a failsafe, and it seems to be doing its job. Am I missing something?
PS. An RT.com article, really? A news source controlled by the Russian government has reason to exaggerate US failures.
'None of the waste appears to have escaped from Tank AY 102 into the environment, the contractor, Washington River Protection Solutions, said.'
The leak is between the inner liner and the outer liner, so actually ZERO has actually escaped.
So, unlikely the retarded mdsolar style summary, the double shell tank has done EXACTLY what it was designed to.
This is like complaining about a seatbelt and airbag doing its just after a minor accident where no one got hurt.
Of course we cannot let facts get in the way of our good healthy radiation terror! All those years of duck-and-cover
drills as the Reds rained nuclear death on our heads would have been wasted!
No problem. Melvin can mop it up.
Harry Reid has been keeping the set aside, safe unified location for nuclear waste in Nevada from having any nuclear waste put in it. Now that he's retiring the new senator might be overridden and we can finally start sticking waste there.
First , it's not "exaggerated in a way" - nothing leaked out of the tank. The story, as presented above,"is complete BS.
You talk about long-term, so I guess you're thinking of the plutonium 239 at the site. The radiation from U239 is stopped by skin, water, etc. So you can pretty safely carry it in your pocket. In fact, I DO carry a similar radioactive material in my pocket. It's not suggested that you eat U239, though. Much like bleach, toilet bowel cleaner, etc, eating it would be bad for you.
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.
I was typing in a hurry. That should be Pu-239. Anyway, try to stay within your protective skin. Without your skin to protect you, plutonium can be dangerous. So don't eat it.
This is nasty shit left over from the US' nuclear bomb program, not civilian nuclear waste. It's completely different stuff; civilian nuclear plants don't produce this sort of waste.
On a more serious note, WTF nuclear industry?! This is why we can't have nice things!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This waste is mostly from making nuclear weapons, not from nuclear power (they did produce electricity, but mostly as a side-effect). This place produced most of the USA's plutonium, and making weapons-grade plutonium isn't a tidy process.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Until less than three years ago, I worked on the Hanford site. My father in law, still works on the site a regularly oversees and checks on tank levels. At least a couple times a year, there is a minor leak, and the media breathlessly goes screaming that the end of the world is nigh. It is rarely serious, but between the media's antinuclear stance, and the Hanford project's desperate need to drag out the project as long as possible, for jobs, these things get over-reported. At this point, all the waste has been relocated from single shelled tanks to double shelled tanks where it is waiting disposal at their vitrification plant that was recently finished. None of this waste actually leaked anywhere. What it means is that one of the innermost shells on one of the tanks has finally failed significantly. The waste is still contained. This isn't a surprise as even the double shelled tanks are getting old, hence the plan to vitrify (glassify the waste).
35000 gallons are equivalent to 132490 liters.
It seems like the Molten Salt reactors can take a number of different elements.
I just wonder if we can burn up some of these liquid wastes, rather than having them sit around making a mess.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You shouldn't expect an unknown domain name to belong to a US site unless it ends in .us.
There will be someone at the door waiting to collect your geek card from you on your way out.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
is we Americans are pretty much ignoring infrastructure expenses. What happens if the outer tank breaks? It's sorta like if my air bags go off. After that I probably want a new car. But to keep up the Car analogy we keep driving it and the next time we're dead.
I'm also reminded of our response to Flint, MI's water crisis. Which is a big "meh". We can't even get a disaster fixed _after_ it happens. So I get nervous when I see a potential disaster that can (for some indeterminate amount of time) be ignored by a country with a long history of ignoring problems...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
is we Americans are pretty much ignoring infrastructure expenses. What happens if the outer tank breaks? It's sorta like if my air bags go off. After that I probably want a new car. But to keep up the Car analogy we keep driving it and the next time we're dead. I'm also reminded of our response to Flint, MI's water crisis. Which is a big "meh". We can't even get a disaster fixed _after_ it happens. So I get nervous when I see a potential disaster that can (for some indeterminate amount of time) be ignored by a country with a long history of ignoring problems...
:P.
And sorry for the dupe post, replied to the wrong thread
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Is this even real? RT publishes a lot of nonsense, particularly anti-nuclear nonsense RT is just a propaganda weapon for Putin, and it puts out a lot of stuff to try and discredit the West, and vilify the American government, plus others...
Third parties and clueless fanboys are claiming a lot more than anyone who knows anything about these reactors are claiming. They get more out of spent fuel and expired weapon materials than other reactor designs. It's not remotely close to a solution to some other high level waste, most medium level waste or any low level waste.
So not an imaginary magic wand just another real thing in the toolbox.
This is nasty shit left over from the US' nuclear bomb program, not civilian nuclear waste. It's completely different stuff; civilian nuclear plants don't produce this sort of waste.
Because obviously military plutonium degrades to different elements than merely civilian plutonium. They even operate using completely different physics.
I know you know the saying that "there is nothing so permanent as a temporary solution."
So perhaps the only responsible thing to do is to refuse to participate in producing anything which is not workable as a long-term solution. It's irresponsible to participate in this farce.
It's not the engineer's job to force political action
It's part of their job to refuse to participate in a farce like the way we treat nuclear waste, just as it's irresponsible to create or sell a nuclear reactor to the USA given what they will do with it. It's illegal to sell a gun to someone you know will misuse it; what's the difference here?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Naturally. When you set off a bomb over Japan I'm sure it induced a TON of electrical current in their transmission lines.
Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.
The amounts of Pu in the waste tanks should be relatively small, as most of it was extracted (the whole point of the Hanford site was to manufacture Pu, afterall, and they wouldn't willingly throw product out in the waste stream).
The waste tanks contain stuff that is far more radioactive than Pu, basically all the fission products (Cs-137, Sr-90, and other wonderful stuff), suspended in an alkaline (pH ~12) mixture of various salts and solvents. The stuff is quite hot both radioactively and thermally (due to decay heat), as well as chemically reactive. It consists of a supernatant liquid over a thick layer of sludge. About the worst possible stuff to be dealing with in terms of long-term management.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
I don't recall anyone saying those things about nuclear bombs, which was the primary purpose of the Hanford Site.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
This was waste from making nuclear bombs. It is not related to nuclear power plants.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
what goes around and drops on people comes around and laks into the groundwater.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
You're being an ass. I know you know the saying that "there is nothing so permanent as a temporary solution." Dealing with this in a permanent manner was not feasible, and may still not be feasible. However long the tanks were designed to last, people were going to ignore them until they became a problem. There is a lot of radioactive shit that needs to be cleaned up there, and limited resources to do it with. It's not the engineer's job to force political action, and in point of fact that's damned hard to do with a fucking tank design. It's not like you can use politicians for structural supports.
In most jobs, anybody who says "that's not my job" is looking to get fired.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
I mean, the Hanford site isn't, like, close to the Columbia River or anything... Oh wait Well, at least the columbia river isn't used for agriculture... Ummm ok ok, nobody is drinking this shit are they... a yeah
http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/nwp/faq.htm
#cantwaittellsombodysaysitisn'tabigdealcausethereisnowaytheleakagecangetintothecolumbia
The rightwing mantra: It's not a problem until there are bodies. And after there are bodies, the invisible hand of the market will ensure that it doesn't happen again.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
There was a permanent solution decided on in the 70s, built in the 80s and 90s, and then suspended / cancelled by everyone's favorite Senior Senator from Nevada after the >$90B was spent on construction jobs in his state.
But somehow people think that's the engineers' fault?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
While active that stuff is nowhere up to the level of being usable as fuel - hence it it waste.