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Report Says Radioactive Monitors Failed at Nuclear Plant (apnews.com)
A new report says mistakes and mismanagement are to blame for the exposure of workers to radioactive particles at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state. From the report: Contractor CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation on Thursday released its evaluation of what went wrong in December during demolition of the nuclear reservation's highly contaminated Plutonium Finishing Plant. The Tri-City Herald reports the study said primary radioactive air monitors used at a highly hazardous Hanford project failed to detect contamination. Then, when the spread of contamination was detected, the report said steps taken to contain it didn't fully work.
At least 11 Hanford workers checked since mid-December inhaled or ingested small amounts of radioactive particles. Private and government vehicles were contaminated with radioactive particles. The sprawling site in southeastern Washington contains more than 50 million gallons of radioactive and toxic wastes in underground storage tanks. It's owned by the U.S. Department of Energy, which hires private contractors to manage the cleanup work. Hanford was established during World War II and made the plutonium for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. The 560-square mile site also made most of the plutonium for the nation's nuclear arsenal during the Cold War.
At least 11 Hanford workers checked since mid-December inhaled or ingested small amounts of radioactive particles. Private and government vehicles were contaminated with radioactive particles. The sprawling site in southeastern Washington contains more than 50 million gallons of radioactive and toxic wastes in underground storage tanks. It's owned by the U.S. Department of Energy, which hires private contractors to manage the cleanup work. Hanford was established during World War II and made the plutonium for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. The 560-square mile site also made most of the plutonium for the nation's nuclear arsenal during the Cold War.
"Nuclear plant" makes it seem like it's a nuclear power plant. The nuclear power industry in the US has been extremely safe, and subject to extreme safeguards, to the point of unprofitability.
No, Hanford is a former military plutonium production facility, dating from the early 1940s -- things were done hastily at first due to WW2, then without good oversight and often without knowing better. They made a hell of a radioactive mess that will take decades to clean up, assuming we can find a place to put the waste (WIPP in NM needs to open).
If you're on the West Coast and worry about Fukushima, stop worrying, and start worrying about Hanford. If an old tank full of 50 year old radwaste (which is often nitrate-based, and thus also explosive) fails, it will be nasty.
If your monitors are radioactive, safely dispose of them and buy new ones!
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Every time storage or bad management of nuclear waste comes up it reminds me of Leslie Dewan. If the Transatomic design just converts the waste to energy that can solve many scenario's. The question is: would it be able to work on this kind of plutonium waste as well?
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You look absolutely radiant today
That's how it works, right?
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The Transatomic design doesn't do anything yet, and clean nuclear energy is always 10 years away. Also, Leslie Dewan is mostly famous for being famous at this point. She's the engineering equivalent of a Kardashian until she actually gets one of her products to market.
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Shouldn't that be "radioactivity monitors"?
Alpha emitters (like Plutonium) are generally a non-issue for practical purposes. You might get cancer 30 years from now if the stuff is in your lungs. Or not. But no acute effects.
Betas are worse, but I can't think of anything that should be emitting betas in a nuclear facility.
Now gammas are, relatively speaking, killers. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any gamma-emitters associated with nuclear power, but we're not really talking nuclear power here, we're talking nuclear weapon production. Which takes a special kind of reactor, with its own, special, problems....
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It was homer's job to keep that working but he did not get it down as they did not hire an assistant
How can you decontaminate a nuclear waste site, and not have functioning radiation detection?
Wouldn't you think there would have to be 100 different monitors around the area between workers, and equipment, the existing facility monitors, and safety systems for the area?
"engineering equivalent of a Kardashian "
Ouch:)
"... it's being sidelined to avoid getting in the way of agency Administrator Scott Pruitt's anti-science agenda..."
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For a moment I thought the headline read “Report Says Radioactive Monsters Failed at Nuclear Plant”.
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Faux-environmentalists love to misrepresent "spent fuel" as "nuclear waste", even though >96% of the former it is just unused fuel, with the balance rapidly decaying to stability. Readers should appreciate that nuclear is the only energy source to responsibly manage its waste, and that it is only possible because nuclear produces such a trivial amount of waste to start with. None of the resource-intensive "renewable" branded sources have even been asked to do so.
Many advanced reactors can recycle that "waste" into new fuel, but there is one approach that stands apart from the rest. LFTR49 can consume spent fuel 90 times faster than other approaches, while producing new fuel and incredibly valuable medical isotopes unique to the thorium fuel cycle. It is also the most thorough waste burner, yet has the simplest fuel reprocessing. Using thorium enables the plants to operate with a fraction of the fuel, allowing many more to be built with the given resource, and producing virtually no long-term waste.
Flibe Energy may not offer the lowest hanging fruit among advanced reactor designs, but LFTR is uniquely able to reap the full benefits of the thorium fuel cycle: breeding in the thermal spectrum and simple chemical reprocessing. This allows LFTR to truly close the nuclear fuel cycle and run efficiently and indefinitely on nothing but the thorium byproduct of existing rare-earth mining. The online chemical reprocessing allows extraction of many valuable isotopes, and even the "waste" heat from the plant can drive industrial processes like desalination or synfuel production. Revenue from such byproducts also provides an opportunity to reduce the cost of electricity produced.
But the monitors did not detect airborne contamination in December, possibly because some of the particles that spread were too heavy to stay aloft.
They are calling it a "failure" of the airborne particle detectors to detect particles that were not in the air. If the particles are not in the air then people aren't going to breathe them in. It might collect on the soles of their boots but if they are licking the soles of their boots then they need to be checked for mental issues first, then radiation contamination second.
It sounds like there were failures in managing the spread of radioactive material but this mention of a "failure" of airborne particle detectors is not one of them.
Radiation is everywhere and if we are going to regulate its spread then we need to have sane regulations. If Grand Central Station were a nuclear power plant then it would be shutdown for exceeding the annual acceptable dose of radiation for employees.
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We need to take another look at our regulation of radioactive material. If it is as dangerous as the law says it is then we need to close off Grand Central Station and declare it a superfund site. If Grand Central Station is in fact safe to inhabit then so should any other place with an equivalent level of radioactivity.
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Leslie Dewan and Transatomic has had to walk back their claims after being challenged quite publicly by competing nuclear engineers. It became quite obvious when challenged by people that know what they are talking about that the math doesn't add up. This forced Transatomic to become nothing more than another variation on the molten salt reactor (MSR) theme. In direct competition are MSR variants like LFTR, MCFR, MSW, TMSR-LF, and DMSR/IMSR. There are also solid fuel competitors like PHWR, TMSR-SF, MSCR, and FHR.
I have to wonder if Transatomic can be trusted because of their rather over the top claims from the beginning. It seems that they are more honest and realistic in their claims lately but can even this be trusted now?
Companies like Flibe Energy, Terrestrial Power, and ThorCon, seem to be dominating in North America because they've been at this longer, have experienced leadership, and technology that is evolutionary (as opposed to revolutionary). They all compete in some ways and complement each other in other ways. Now that Transatomic offers reactors that have been shown to not be the waste-burners as originally demonstrated they now have to discover or create a market among the competition in North America.
I have to wonder how much of Transatomic's fame is because Leslie Dewan is a graduate of MIT and looks good in high heels, tight pants, and lipstick. I'm sure she's a very intelligent woman, and she claims to be something of a "tomboy", but it seems she likes the cameras and the cameras like her.
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Could you maybe post a reference that they "reduced" the claimns not being a waste burner anymore?
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