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Possible Radioactive Leak Investigated At Washington Nuclear Site (upi.com)
Authorities are investigating radioactive material found on a worker's clothing one week after a tunnel collapse at the waste nuclear waste site in the state of Washington. Around 7 p.m. Thursday, Washington River Protection Solutions, a government contractor contractor in charge of all 177 underground storage tanks at the nuclear site. detected high radiation readings on a robotic device that seven workers were pulling out of a tank. Then, contamination was also discovered on the clothing of one worker -- on one shoe, on his shirt and on his pants in the knee area.
"Radiological monitoring showed contamination on the unit that was three times the planned limit. Workers immediately stopped working and exited the area according to procedure," said Rob Roxburgh, deputy manager of WRPS Communications & Public Relations said to KING-TV. Using leak-detection instruments, WRPS said it did not find liquid escaping the tank. "Everybody was freaked, shocked, surprised," said a veteran worker, who was in direct contact with crew members. "[The contamination] was not expected. They're not supposed to find contamination in the annulus [safety perimeter] of the double shell tanks."
Washington's attorney general, urging a federal clean-up of the site, insists "This isn't the first potential leak and it won't be the last."
"Radiological monitoring showed contamination on the unit that was three times the planned limit. Workers immediately stopped working and exited the area according to procedure," said Rob Roxburgh, deputy manager of WRPS Communications & Public Relations said to KING-TV. Using leak-detection instruments, WRPS said it did not find liquid escaping the tank. "Everybody was freaked, shocked, surprised," said a veteran worker, who was in direct contact with crew members. "[The contamination] was not expected. They're not supposed to find contamination in the annulus [safety perimeter] of the double shell tanks."
Washington's attorney general, urging a federal clean-up of the site, insists "This isn't the first potential leak and it won't be the last."
and three times the planned limit is nothing. Before I quit, we had a scare where the monitors said there was a "major" problem, but it was someone that had an old smoke detector in their backpack that they brought from home that they forgot about. If a smoke detector is considered safe in your home, then having one at a radioactive dump shouldn't be considered a problem, but it was. This is just people being overly cautious.
So it's taking all this time for nothing to progress, and you want to start a congressional investigation? How about just getting it done, which is apparently not what current government can do anymore.
This is what happens when it's just government contractors, contractors all the way down.
The problem with the "cleanup" is that once you have "cleaned up" the radiation, where are you going to put it? In a landfill? That is just moving the problem from one place to another. A geological repository like Yucca Mountain doesn't work, because that is for small amounts of high level waste, not large amounts of low level waste like we have at Hanford.
There really aren't any good solutions, but in politics "something must be done" so paying contractors to play environmental theater while they move stuff around in circles is about the best we can do.
Obviously gamma radiation corrupted the editor's PC memory resulting in the duplication of words and addition of spurious periods.
Have gnu, will travel.
As a superhero in training, I've licked every part of that nuclear site to expose myself to radiation and while one puddle made my teeth feel warm, I still don't have any superpowers, so I would say it's a safe bet that this is a false alarm. It's unrelated but does anyone know a good dentist? Because my teeth recently fell out. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
"Radioactive waste" doesn't tell me much. What are the nuclides, how many curies?
Find a a shallow water off-shore geologic subduction zone,drill in close to drop down point,pump in low level waste,it's not perfect,but it is probably far safer than gathering it all together on a land site and storing/processing,if it seems to work ok,for say a century,start getting rid of the realy dangerous high level crud in the same way. /waste industry and govs, then use that as dump hole..
Keep fingers crossed for several thousand years until "proven" a safer system.
Or combine two projects,ultra deep moho drilling project funded by nuclear
Didn't you watch The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret? You bottle the stuff and sell it as a power drink.
government contractor contractor
The only issue is that contractor contractors have been known on the odd occasion to accidentally the whole thing.
Sigger than your average
^ Clearly hasn't played Kerbal Space Program. The delta-V required to get something to the Sun is incredible.
Sending that much mass (contaminated soil) into space will be super expensive and you'll want to get it out of an Earth orbit, preferably. Getting to Mars is cheap in comparison.
Outside of the North Americas we use the word "trousers", with "pants" refers to underwear. So seeing a phrase like "radioactive material was found on his pants" tends to raise some eyebrows...
Three times the allowed limits. Hmmm....
Chances of cancer from same? Zero. Three times the allowed limits (unless they've changed the limits a lot since I was paying attention 30 years ago) is less than one chest X-Ray....
Now, if they'd sustained that level for a whole year, that might be an issue. But a one-time, short-term exposure only three times the limit? Meaningless....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I also worked at Hanford. I remember there was a hilarious incidence once, where a spent nuclear fuel rod fell down the back of a co-workers shirt and he only noticed driving home. Anyway, he pulled it out of his shirt and threw it out the window and then it was hit by a kid on a skateboard and fell down a drain, so all's well that end's well...
Yes sir, I can see that this nuclear storage thing is going to end well!
This report brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department.
And by the Liberal Nuculer Iss-Yew Diversion Network. Hanford is a weapons facility dating to the early Cold War, when we knew little about nuclear waste storage.
Sending high-level nuclear waste to space is a bad idea because it represents a waste of 95% of the energy in the original fuel. Sending low-level waste to space is a bad idea because the tonnage of inert material that would have to be lifted is uneconomically high. Better to vitrify it and drop it into a subduction zone.
Well, I guess they have no way of knowing : P
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
According to Merriam Webster, that is a valid way to pronounce it.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
"once you have "cleaned up" the radiation, where are you going to put it?"
Ideally into a MSR, where it can be burned down (or left alone for around 300 years when it should be safe enough to handle anyway)
"Even worse, it is usually presented in a form such as "3 times higher than normal!!!" or some such jibberish because while meaningless without further information, a scientifically illiterate populace is easily swayed by the apparently alarming fact."
Compounded by memories of radiation injuries to the general public which WERE caused by people playing fast and loose with (lack of) safety standards.
Not just the radium girls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... but also ill-advised "pedoscopes" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - which were usually poorly maintained, and awareness of the radiation-induced injuries at hiroshima and nagasaki (which whilst horrific, are used to vastly overblow fear of "radiation" beyond all rational analysis - useful to discourage people from engaging in nuclear war but a handicap when trying to rationally approach risk management)
I believe the materials stored in liquid form are medium to high-level waste, not the low-level waste. They have all sorts at Hanford (and at Sellafield/ Seascale/ Windscale/ Calder Hall, where I was trying to get work some years ago). And part of the proposal for Yucca mountain was specifically to store higher-level material from Hanford.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
That's a contradiction in terms. If it's subducting, then the weight of the descending oceanic slab will pull the surface of the ocean down into a trench. You're looking at drilling into 10,000ft or deeper water - doable, but not routine.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"