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Hanford Nuclear Waste Cleanup Makes Progress, But Questions Loom (ieee.org)
The Hanford Vit Plant in Washington state, a $17 billion federal facility for treating and immobilizing radioactive waste, is now on track to begin "glassifying" low-activity nuclear waste as soon as 2022, reports IEEE Spectrum. This is "a year ahead of a court-mandated deadline." From the report: Still, an air of uncertainty surrounds the project. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has proposed reclassifying some of the nation's radioactive waste as less dangerous, and it's unclear how that could affect the Hanford facility's long-term prospects. Hanford houses about 212 million liters of high-level waste, the leftovers of the U.S. nuclear weapons program.
However, higher-level waste has a longer timeline. Separate pretreatment and vitrification facilities aren't slated for commissioning until 2033. All parts of the Vit Plant are legally required to begin fully operating by 2036, under a consent decree between Washington, Oregon, and the federal government. The DOE hasn't said whether, or how, its proposal to reclassify nuclear waste would affect existing plans at Hanford if adopted. The agency is not making any decisions on the classification or disposal of any particular waste stream at this time, a DOE official said by email. [...] Though current law defines high-level radioactive waste as the sludge that results from processing highly radioactive nuclear fuel, the DOE is considering slapping a new, potentially less expensive label on it if it can meet the radioactive concentration limits for Class C low-level radioactive waste. Reclassifying nuclear waste would allow the federal government to sidestep decades of cleanup work, saving it billions of dollars. The relabeling might even enable the DOE to bypass costly vitrification and instead contain tank waste by covering it with concrete-like grout, as the agency does at other decommissioned nuclear sites. Officials and citizens in Washington and Oregon oppose this method for Hanford, "citing the risk of long-term soil and groundwater contamination and the challenges of moving and storing voluminous grout blocks," reports IEEE Spectrum. "Earlier federal studies found that grout 'actually performed the worst of all the supplemental treatment options considered.' (A 2017 report to Congress, however, suggested both vitrification and grout could effectively treat Hanford's low-activity waste.)"
However, higher-level waste has a longer timeline. Separate pretreatment and vitrification facilities aren't slated for commissioning until 2033. All parts of the Vit Plant are legally required to begin fully operating by 2036, under a consent decree between Washington, Oregon, and the federal government. The DOE hasn't said whether, or how, its proposal to reclassify nuclear waste would affect existing plans at Hanford if adopted. The agency is not making any decisions on the classification or disposal of any particular waste stream at this time, a DOE official said by email. [...] Though current law defines high-level radioactive waste as the sludge that results from processing highly radioactive nuclear fuel, the DOE is considering slapping a new, potentially less expensive label on it if it can meet the radioactive concentration limits for Class C low-level radioactive waste. Reclassifying nuclear waste would allow the federal government to sidestep decades of cleanup work, saving it billions of dollars. The relabeling might even enable the DOE to bypass costly vitrification and instead contain tank waste by covering it with concrete-like grout, as the agency does at other decommissioned nuclear sites. Officials and citizens in Washington and Oregon oppose this method for Hanford, "citing the risk of long-term soil and groundwater contamination and the challenges of moving and storing voluminous grout blocks," reports IEEE Spectrum. "Earlier federal studies found that grout 'actually performed the worst of all the supplemental treatment options considered.' (A 2017 report to Congress, however, suggested both vitrification and grout could effectively treat Hanford's low-activity waste.)"
THE most important problem with nuclear power ? COST.
This argument has been going on for years. On one hand, the DOE keeps changing the rules for vitrification, and processing, and keeps the shell game going at Hanford. On the other hand, they've shut down the Savannah River reclamation project, and mothballed Yucca Mountain. So, we keep kicking the can down the road, and in the meantime, the storage containers that currently exist at Hanford are getting older and more subject to decay and leakage. It's going to take another crisis for them to make a definitive plan - but I don't know why I expect anything less....
This stuff was mined out the ground, and a lot of effort spent on processing it to get it to a 'useful' state for boom stuff and power generation.
It's a shame that the waste/depleted version can't be reprocessed several times to get the most out of it (irrespective of cost, as I suspect that in itself may come down one enough minds set on the problem, with enough incentive to get it fixed).
I mean, it's still radioactive, still emitting particles - isn't there a proper use for a lot of this stuff somewhere(space?, thermopiles?) that isn't destructive? or is it simply 'stick it in some glass and keep it cool' the only thing we have going?
It's happening. I'm a shareholder in a utility that has nukes. Some of these leftists were bitching about their health and their children's well-being and other nonsense about the environment.
I wish those leftists would realize that in a Capitalist system, profits matter more than human health - especially their childrens'. If the get tumors or something, then well it's off to St.Jude's. Kid dies? Have another one! Or adopt if your sperm or eggs have been fried by the plant!
And don't get me started about their bitching and moaning about Coal - AMERICA's fuel! And those miners that got killed - PLEASE! They CHOSE that job.
These fucking leftists don't get how wonderful they have it here in America!
You have no idea. I grew up across the river from that hellhole during the cold war. Hanford is like Chernoble in severity, but it's a crisis over much longer period time. The radiation is is still there. More disturbing is the fact that we aren't sure what is stored there because we weren't sure what it was when we made it. We just knew it was bad.
Deposit the nuke waste into spent coal shafts. Since coal is clean, and the coal shafts have residual coal, which is the best for cleaning, the nuke waste is made inert in a few years give or take. Excellent. Excellent. Excellsior.
I was working for the state out there 20 years ago and they said they were making progress.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
It was never like that. Just better than coal... pretty much all we had at the time. Plus all of this is from weapons production, not plants. Because of people like you we have technology from the 60s generating our power instead of newer reactors. Who would have thought, old designs produce more waste, cost more to maintain and can fail much more catastrophically...
Going forward we have coal, gas, wind and solar as alternatives and we're not anywhere near viable fusion. Coal and gas pollute, solar and wind aren't high enough capacity and the manufacturing of solar panels produces hazardous waste too. Plus all the used up panels.
SO how much do you like having 24/7 electricity? China at least knows what's up. They're building modern plants.
Quotes from the parent comment:
... is absurdly high..."
"... the cost of constructing nuclear power plants,
Also extremely high: "the cost of dealing with the radioactive waste materials."
"the corruption and incompetence is staggering, and far outweighs the benefits of nuclear power."
The Hanford Site was established in 1943. "... decades of manufacturing left behind 53 million US gallons (200,000 m3) of high-level radioactive waste..."
Perhaps every 2 years for more than 5 decades, there have been new claims about cleaning the Hanford site. This Slashdot story is a good example of demonstrating the confusion and inadequate management. One of the problems in the past is that most government officials didn't have technical knowledge, but tried to make decisions anyway.
Humans have made a mess that humans don't know how to fix. Nuclear fission plants have never made sense, partly because of the immense problems dealing with radioactive waste.
AHAHAHHAHAHHAHA, #MAGAtards!!!!!!!
Suck it, bitches!!!!!!!!
Start crying in . . .
3 . . .
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Most of the cost. MOST, is in legal challenges and the costs of the associated delays. Lawyers are evil, and the "greens" who have forced hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 in the air by sabotaging nuclear are the root of that evil.
You're a good example of Republican INCEL faggots with no idea of science trying to pretend Trump isn't a traitor.
I'm an honest to god red and I want nuclear everything, don't lump nimby fake greens with sensible leftists.
Also extremely high: "the cost of dealing with the radioactive waste materials."
"the corruption and incompetence is staggering, and far outweighs the benefits of nuclear power." ... ...
The Hanford Site was established in 1943. "... decades of manufacturing left behind 53 million US gallons (200,000 m3) of high-level radioactive waste..."
Humans have made a mess that humans don't know how to fix. Nuclear fission plants have never made sense, partly because of the immense problems dealing with radioactive waste.
The article you link makes it very clear that Hanford is a waste site for nuclear weapons production, not nuclear power plant fuel. You're dragging nuclear electrical power production into a historical problem from the early days of nuclear weapon production.
Are you deliberately conflating the two? Can you not make your point with actual commercial nuclear power fuel production and waste storage?
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
TFA is written from the viewpoint that nuclear waste glassification is some hot new fix for controlling nuclear (Nuk-lear, not using Greenpeace's pronunciation of Nuk-u-lee-ar) waste. It isn't. It has been around for years, in "testing." The first person to come up with glassification as a way to immobilize nuclear waste presented his discovery - working - to the DOE back in the middle-late 20th century. Heard nothing back from the DOE other than "we're testing it." He found the hardware in a junkyard near the DOE office a few days later, still in the shipping boxes.
And Greenpeace does not understand physics. Radioactive half-lives are a measure of how "hot" (radioactive) a compound is per unit time. 1 mole of 1hr half-life material will kill you much faster than 1 mole of 1 billion year material.
Quoting that article: "Besides the cleanup project, Hanford also hosts a commercial nuclear power plant, the Columbia Generating Station..."
The problems at Chernobyl and Fukushima and Hanford have shown that humans cannot manage large nuclear plants of any kind. I knew one of the managers at Hanford, so I had facts from inside the organization.
We already do this to collect the closing costs of a nuclear plant. For every dollar a customer pays for electricity generated with nuclear power, a few cents go into building up a fund to pay for the cleanup of any accidents. Japan's nuclear plants have produced roughly 200 TWh per year for the last 30 years, or 6000 TWh. The Fukushima cleanup cost is currently estimated at $180 billion. So its cost relative to the amount of power generated is ($180 billion) / (6000 TWh) = $30 million / TWh = $30 / MWh = 3 cents / kWh.
So a surcharge of just 3 cents/kWh on all electricity generated by nuclear power would have paid for the Fukushima cleanup costs. As there have only been two major nuclear accidents, 3 cents/kWh is probably towards the high end. But it's small enough you could just go with it and collect that into a disaster fund. (The third-biggest accident - 3 Mile Island - had a $1 billion cleanup cost. If you amortize that over all nuclear power production in the U.S., it works out to just 0.006 cents/kWh. A Fukushima-sized cleanup here would work out to a 1.1 cent/kWh surcharge.)
And to address AC's comment, Insurance doesn't work because only a small number of nuclear plants are necessary to power the world. The U.S. has about 100 nuclear plants, which generate 20% of all our electricity. About 450 nuclear plants throughout the world provides 10% of the world's electricity. For insurance to work, insurers have to be able to reliably predict what the rate of payout will be year-to-year. This requires a huge number of individual insurance policies.
The greater your sample size (the more individual insurance policies there are), the tighter the probability distribution gets. That's what turns unexpected costs of accidents and disasters into predictable costs. To get a distribution tight enough for insurance to be reliably predictable requires at least ~10,000 individual insured. Fewer than that and it becomes dfficult to make business decisions with a high degree of certainty. (i.e. their profit margin fluctuates by several percent each year based on random chance, swamping out any effects of their actual business decisions, making it difficult for them to determine if a good year was due to good decisions or good luck, or a bad year was due to bad decisions or bad luck.)
This is why insurance on nuclear plants is astronomical. The insurers can't sell enough policies to make the risk predictable. So they end up having to charge a premium several hundred or several thousand times the expected payout to minimize their risk exposure.
'This is "a year ahead of a court-mandated deadline"'
Wow, there's a statement that instills confidence.
Remember that nuclear weapons production was primarily done via nuclear power production. You need reactors to make plutonium. Reactors generate heat. May as well use that heat to spin a turbine while you are at it.
Commercial reactor waste is not the whole problem at Hanford, but it's part of the problem. We still don't have a good solution for the commercial fuel bundles - right now the answer is "put them in a steel-lined concrete cask and let them sit on a concrete pad until we come up with something better." This is what is being done at nuclear power plants across the nation, and then we're pretending like it's a solution.
At Hanford, the real nasty shit there is the liquid crap left over from extracting the plutonium, and the horrific record keeping that was done - they have tanks there with caustic radioactive sludge that they don't really know the composition of - a toxic soup of solvents and transuranics in underground tanks that were meant to be emptied and disposed of decades ago. At least they're finally getting around to vitrifying it into something that can't seep into the Columbia River.
Yes, that's the big issue at Hanford now. But they are still going to have to deal with all the fuel bundles someday that are sitting all over the place because Yucca Mountain never opened.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
TFA isn't infallable gospel sent from on-high. In general, the description tracks, but it doesn't include everything that goes on there. I know, for a fact, that the cores of old reactors from Navy vessels are dumped there. You can call those weapons, I guess, but they were actually power plants for those vessels. Hanford is where old nuke ships go to die. The article you're bitching about even told you...WHO didn't read? From the wiki link in your quote:
See that last one? One of those 114 reactors was taken there BY ME.
I am saying what others are saying. The entire situation is badly managed.
I don't agree with you. You have refused to see the overall situation, in my opinion.
I have followed the "Hanford Cleanup" for literally decades. To me, Hanford has seemed badly managed.
The overall issue is that we are not seeing the necessary quality of management at ANY site involving large quantities of radioactive products.
partly because of the immense problems dealing with radioactive waste.
If breeder reactors were not illegal (fear of proliferation), then burning all of that "waste" down would increase the amount of energy we can derive from nuclear AND make it so once everything is said and done, the only "waste" left will be indistinguishable from background radiation that we are exposed to every day by the huge nuclear plant in the sky.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen