Hanford Nuclear Waste Vitrification Plant "Too Dangerous" 292
Noryungi writes "Scientific American reports, in a chilling story, that the Hanford, Washington nuclear waste vitrification treatment plant is off to a bad start. Bad planning, multiple sources of radioactive waste, and leaking containment pools are just the beginning. It's never a good sign when that type of article includes the word 'spontaneous criticality,' if you follow my drift..."
It seems the main problem is that the waste has settled in distinct layers, and has to be piped through corroded old tubes, leading to all sorts of exciting problems (e.g. enough plutonium aggregating to start a reaction).
Why is anyone surprised (Score:5, Informative)
This always happens. Lowest cost + government insurance = safety failure.
Re:Greed (Score:2, Informative)
These same rare earths are needed for nuclear power plants (neodymium magnets, copper wires and suchlike). Indeed they are needed for all power plants.
But once they were used in nuclear power plants, radioactive contamination makes them impossible to recycle.
Re:Greed (Score:1, Informative)
Uh, this was a military complex, operating to produce weapons-grade material and experimenting with weapons chemistry. And one who's poor practices were started decades ago, before there was a commercial nuclear industry. Not a commercial plant.
Re:Greed (Score:5, Informative)
Hanford is not a civilian site. This is the waste from the plutonium production used for weapons.
Spent fuel from the civilian industry usually has the form of ceramic uranium oxide inside tubes made from a zirconium alloy.
You can vitrify that too ( England does) , but there is no absolute need for it. The geological disposal planned by Finland and Sweden
does not rely on it as example, and in the US reprocessing civilian nuclear fuel is currently illegal.
What you're doing is a little bit like pointing to aviation deaths in the air force and trying to claim it proves you should not travel with Airbus. It isn't very rational.
Don't you just love Government? (Score:5, Informative)
In 2000, the DoE and Bechtel National, Inc. (the contractor retained to build the Vitrification plant at Hanford) began construction of the plant before the design of the critical elements of the plant had been completed - in fact, before the design of many of those elements had even been started. The goal, to save time and money.
Trying to build a house? No problem... our construction team have built a few of those so they know what to do based on early architectural sketches and teamwork. But this is not a house, it is a vitrification plant for 50+ million gallons of the worst nuclear waste in the world with a total radioactive potential of around 170-180 million curies (Cernobyl released about half that). Oh, and that shit is not only hot radioactively, it is hot temperature-wise too.
Today, 60 of 177 storage tanks are leaking with the rest at a high risk of leaking, and if all goes well the complex to house the worst of the waste after vitrification will be built by 2048, with the whole vitrification process completed by 2062. Unless there are delays... after all, this is a government project, they are good at hitting project deadlines, right?
Each tank is layered, with a relatively solid layer at the bottom, a salt cake above that, then sludge followed by liquid and a gas layer. Sounds a bit like my toilet after a bad Chinese meal... only more of it. Most of the radioactivity is in the solids and sludge whereas most of the volume is in the liquids and the salt cake - you need the liquid to transfer the rest through the crappy piping and filters from the storage tanks to the vitrification plant, and it all has to flow fast enough to keep the solids moving without causing any blockages or radioactive buildups.
To top it all off, the glass mixture used in the vitrification process has to be tailoered to the mixture in the tank, and given the diversity of radioactive processes, materials and production methods in use on site, there will be at least 10 compounts required, with no way of knowing what is in what tank short of analysing the contents and getting a representative sample of everything in the tank.
Simple :-S
To my layman's mind, two things come to mind - 1. The whole thing is a complete clusterfuck, and it will be a miracle if the whole lot does not end very badly. 2, Top priority is to contain the leak in the immediate vicinity, but short of digging some massive trenches and excavating a huge foundation then filling the whole lot with some kind of radioactive-resistant concrete, and doing it in such a way that you can inspect the result for leaks, I cannot see how they are going to manage that.
Time to call in Bruce Willis and get him to start drilling, I guess.
Say it with me now... (Score:2, Informative)
Thorium molten salt reactors are much safer in the short and long term.
Re:Greed (Score:2, Informative)
With respect, are you really trying to say there are no reactors remaining of the same design as that one in Chernobyl? If you are, then please stop spouting shit that a quick google search would have shown you is shit and instead comment on a topic that you know more than zero about.
Re:Greed (Score:4, Informative)
These same rare earths are needed for nuclear power plants (neodymium magnets, copper wires and suchlike). Indeed they are needed for all power plants.
But once they were used in nuclear power plants, radioactive contamination makes them impossible to recycle.
That's just pure FUD. Anything on the clean side of the reactor (basically anything this side of the primary heat exchanger is just like any other power plant. I can asure you anything copper is no where near the "dirty" side of the reactor, it just isn't a suitable material. And I'm not sure why you'd need neodymium magnets anywhere. I'd imagine any generator or motor magnets would be eletromagnets.
Even for materials exposed to nuclear waste, things like metals can be cleaned then recycled, the cleanup waste then being considered nuclear waste. Most metals can be recycled. Concrete that's been exposed to nuclear waste (like water from cooling ponds) can be tricky, but metal cladding is used for such ponds, that can be stripped and cleaned, leaving the underlying concrete clean of nuclear contaminants.
Greed == "a lack of attention to detail" (Score:3, Informative)
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Prior to 2012, plenty of other problems were found at San Onofre: "Problems at nuclear plant concern regulators" [utsandiego.com] in the San Diego Union Tribune covered a few of these which ended up "resulting in the simultaneous shutdown of two safety backup systems and placing operators on standby to shut down a nuclear reactor."
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In Florida, you've got the hubris of Duke Energy trying to repair a cooling tower on its own using its own idiots rather than hiring people expertly capable of doing things just to save $10M$us (ten million usa dollars) resulting in the total shutdown of the Crystal River nuclear plant until at least 2014 at a total cost of repair projected to be $2.75B$us (2.75 Billion usa dollars):
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The blunder shows that a highly experienced nuclear operator with a sterling reputation in the industry is not immune from unforeseen miscues that raise questions about judgment and competence.
The sequence of mistakes has put Progress in a state of crisis management for more than two years. Company officials are dealing with persistent questions from Wall Street analysts while they negotiate data requests from the insurer, Nuclear Electric Insurance Limited, known as NEIL.
http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/energy/crystal-river-nuclear-plant-had-flaw-in-its-safety-procedures-for-more/1276841 [tampabay.com] also shows that Crystal River had other serious problems, just like so many other plants that consistently skirt safety regulations and prescribed critical safety procedures:
and those are just from a quick cursory review from a web search engine. People who look harder can find more. The common link in all of these are shortcuts taken to save money and to bypass conventional procedures which are required to be followed by the NRC.
Re:Greed (Score:4, Informative)
Your worried about a minor nuclear event that will never have a death attributed to it directly...
And completely ignoring the towns that simply ceased to exist due to the tsunami?
Hundreds or thousands dead ... And your freaked the fuck out about a nucleAr uptake increase that's lower than the airplane flight you'd take to get there.
You have absolutely no clue what you should ACTUALLY be worried about.
Re:Greed (Score:4, Informative)
All good questions. Some investigations [whoi.edu] are yielding some some answers [nature.com].
"Bottom-dwelling fish in the Fukushima area show radioactivity levels above the limit of 100 becquerels per kilogram set by the Japanese government. Greenlings, for example, have been found to have levels as high as 25,000 becquerels per kilogram." That's more than just a little excess.
In concrete terms, losses to the fishing industry exceeding a billion dollars are mentioned, with "many fisheries" still closed as of November 2012.
Was the evacuation necessary? Well, it's the government's decision to make, and they made it. Some 4,500 square miles [psr.org] – an area almost the size of Connecticut – was found to have radiation levels that exceeded Japan’s allowable exposure rate of 1 mSV (millisievert) per year. 310 square miles were declared "permanent" exclusion zones. Estimates of the lost economic value of these losses range from $250 to 500 billion.
Hanford wasn't a civilian power plant (Score:5, Informative)
In case anyone wants to use this incident to bash nuclear power, it's worth noting that Hanford was not a civilian nuclear power plant. It was a U.S. Government owned and operated site that produced plutonium for nuclear warheads. The military wasn't required to follow any kind of environmental or safety standards for most of the site's lifetime, and they didn't.
Re:Hopeless (Score:4, Informative)
They sent us Celiene Dion and Justin Beiber. I think that counts as a hostile country.
To be fair, they also let you have Michael J. Fox, Alex Trebek, and Eugene Levy.
On the third hand, you also got William Shatner and Paul Shaffer, so call it a wash?
Re:Greed (Score:4, Informative)
It should be fairly obvious from the context that "done right now" would clearly not apply to things that have already long since have been done.
Nevertheless it is good to see your humility:
please stop spouting shit
Nonetheless:
With respect, are you really trying to say there are no reactors remaining of the same design as that one in Chernobyl?
From the wiki:
""After the Chernobyl disaster, all RBMKs in operation underwent significant changes, lowering their void coefficients to +0.7 Î. This new number decreases the possibility of a low-coolant meltdown.""
So yeah, I am also claiming that there are no reactors with the same design as the Chernobyl one still operating, since all remaining operational RBMKs have been significantly modified to correct that particularly glaring design flaw.
a quick google search would have shown you is shit
Touche.