Nuclear Waste Accident Costs Los Alamos Contractor $57 Million 166
HughPickens.com writes The LA Times reports that Los Alamos National Security, the contractor managing the nuclear weapons laboratory at Los Alamos, NM has been slapped with a $57-million reduction in its fees for 2014, largely due to a costly nuclear waste accident in which a 55-gallon drum packaged with plutonium waste from bomb production erupted after being placed in a 2,150-foot underground dump in the eastern New Mexico desert. Casks filled with 3.2 million cubic feet of deadly radioactive wastes remain buried at the crippled plant and the huge facility was rendered useless. The exact causes of the chemical reaction are still under investigation, but Energy Department officials say a packaging error at Los Alamos caused a reaction inside the drum. The radioactive material went airborne, contaminating a ventilation shaft that went to the surface giving low-level doses of radiation to 21 workers. According to a DOE report, the disaster at WIPP is rooted in careless contractors and lack of DOE oversight (PDF). "The accident was a horrific comedy of errors," says James Conca, a scientific advisor and expert on the WIPP. "This was the flagship of the Energy Department, the most successful program it had. The ramifications of this are going to be huge. Heads will roll."
The accident is likely to cause at least an 18-month shutdown and possibly a closure that could last several years. Waste shipments have already backed up at nuclear cleanup projects across the country, which even before the accident were years behind schedule. According to the Times, the cost of the accident, including likely delays in cleanup projects across the nation, will approach $1 billion. But some nuclear weapons scientists say the fine is an overreaction. "It was a mistake by an individual — a terrible mistake — and Washington now wants to punish a lot of people," says Conca. "The amount of radiation that was released was trivial. As long as you don't lick the walls, you can't get any radiation down there. Why are we treating this like Fukushima?"
The accident is likely to cause at least an 18-month shutdown and possibly a closure that could last several years. Waste shipments have already backed up at nuclear cleanup projects across the country, which even before the accident were years behind schedule. According to the Times, the cost of the accident, including likely delays in cleanup projects across the nation, will approach $1 billion. But some nuclear weapons scientists say the fine is an overreaction. "It was a mistake by an individual — a terrible mistake — and Washington now wants to punish a lot of people," says Conca. "The amount of radiation that was released was trivial. As long as you don't lick the walls, you can't get any radiation down there. Why are we treating this like Fukushima?"
Why the overreaction? (Score:5, Informative)
"It was a mistake by an individual..."
A with out good process, more individuals will be making more mistakes. Mistakes that "will approach $1 billion". There is a good reason people are going to walk up the chain and start blaming entire contracting companies, and hopefully start blaming the people that hired the contractors, and blame the people who wrote the processes that the contractors were supposed to follow.
If we can't get the storage of nuclear waste from weapons and power production right, then we're in a real pickle. A terrible radioactive pickle.
Re:Why the overreaction? (Score:4, Insightful)
And when the public sees how seriously errors of this nature are treated, it may help turn a negative (a bunch of leaked waste) into a positive (but we've got procedures in place to deal with and ensure the issue does not happen again). Anyone remember Deepwater Horizon anymore?
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Anyone remember Deepwater Horizon anymore?
I LOVED that movie! Bruce Willis was awesome!
And the hot chick in the bikini! Wooo!
Gotta go! NFL is on.
-John Q. Public.
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"If we can't get the storage of nuclear waste from weapons and power production right, then we're in a real pickle. A terrible radioactive pickle."
This is an overreaction. Even if you get nuclear waste storage right, accidents may still happen. Overall, nuclear is still safer than any other source of energy so far, including all nuclear accidents since the discovery of the radioactivity. The point is not accidents should never happen, they should be rare and we should handle them properly.
Re:Why the overreaction? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ah, the omnipresent "Nookyoolur = BOMZ!!!!" canard.
Steel can be used in construction. Or it can be used to coat bullets. Or make all sorts of implements of death and destruction. Or it can be made into a scalpel to cut out cancer.
The technology for nuclear power, by itself is neither good nor evil. It's all about intent in use.
Also, as noted, the rare earths being mined to make your "renewable" power? Basically being done by China in the cheapest, dirtiest manner possible. Because the US has been so constipated by the "nuclear issue" that nobody wants to invest in rare earths here because the regulations are not just completely overboard and crazed like Chuck Manson on a bad acid trip, but they're actively hostile towards any development of the technology whatsoever, no matter HOW cleanly it can be done.
Why? Nuke-ninnies like yourself.
And sure, China's rare earths are cheap right now. Until they aren't anymore. Then what?
And what about the vast environmental damage China's doing with their dirty mining procedures? Because you know their digs aren't regulated like they would be in the US.
And the equipment they use sure as fuck doesn't run on pixie dust, unicorn piss and fairy farts.
So don't pretend that your pie-in-the-sky renewable daydream is anything but.
Also, you're still dependent on fossil fuels for when the renewables can't handle the load.
On top of that, the only thing that will make truly widespread implementation of renewables anything CLOSE to viable is a MASSIVE improvement in storage technologies.
Even then, it's NEVER going to be able to be ramped up to a level where it can truly account for both base load AND peak load. You'd have to carpet the entire country in solar cells and windmills. Regardless of whether the location of implementation is truly viable or not. Let's not even talk about worldwide.
THEN you're locked into a continual "buy new ones now that these have worn out" cycle.
That basically makes us, permanently, an economic vassal-state to a hostile foreign power.
The biggest problem with nuclear power today is the fact that there's BEEN little to no new implementation for the last 20-ish years. The last completed reactor was Watts Barr 1 in Tennessee in 1996. This year, Watts Barr 2 is due to come online.
ONE new nuclear power plant in 19 years. And the median age of reactors in the US is 33 years.
Reactors are normally slated to run for 40 years, with the ability to apply for a 20 year extension.
So we have a bunch of reactors coming due for their extension. Old, crude reactors based on 50-60 year old technology.
We have the ability TODAY, to build reactors with new technology that are clean, safe and self-contained. You dig a hole in the ground, drop a concrete slab, drop the reactor in, and cover it in more concrete and bury. At the end of its lifespan, you dig it out and send it back to the factory for reprocessing and drop a new/refurbished one in.
Reactors where the facility isn't 10% reactor and 90% Rube-Goldberg safety systems. Reactors that are 100% reactor which are engineered FROM THE GET GO to be inherently safe. Where a failure doesn't result in a meltdown. Where a failure results in the reactor shutting itself off and keeping the unspent fuel contained and cool, away from the reaction mass.
On top of that, you could jump-start the US rare earths industry again. Because, rather than worrying about all that "radioactive crap" that comes up with the rare earths? That "radioactive crap" becomes "fuel" for reactors. And while costs MIGHT be a bit higher than the dirty Chinese market, they'll be making money at BOTH ends of the spectrum. Both from the rare earths and the rest of the stuff as fuel. Hell, the tailings from ONE modest-sized mine for a year could conceivably satisfy the entirety of the US power appetite for that same period PLUS.
But no. Nuclear = EEEEEEVIL and just waking up in the morning becomes a proliferation risk.
Also, how long as the US been relying on nuclear power? How many lives has that reliance saved?
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Ah, the omnipresent "Nookyoolur = BOMZ!!!!" canard.
The favourite straw man of the pro-nuclear crowd. He sure takes a beating.
Also, as noted, the rare earths being mined to make your "renewable" power? Basically being done by China in the cheapest, dirtiest manner possible.
Maybe that's true of what the US buys, but in the EU companies are required to care about where their raw materials come from. As well as meeting standards like RoHS, when calculating taxes on environmental damage what happens in China to mine the materials they use is taken into consideration.
It's not perfect but it has forced China to start cleaning up, at least when it wants to export to the EU.
The biggest problem with nuclear power today is the fact that there's BEEN little to no new implementation for the last 20-ish years.
No, the biggest problems are the cost
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Ah, the omnipresent "Nookyoolur = BOMZ!!!!" canard.
The favourite straw man of the pro-nuclear crowd. He sure takes a beating.
What strawman? HE brought it up.
Maybe that's true of what the US buys, but in the EU companies are required to care about where their raw materials come from. As well as meeting standards like RoHS, when calculating taxes on environmental damage what happens in China to mine the materials they use is taken into consideration.
It's not perfect but it has forced China to start cleaning up, at least when it wants to export to the EU.
And if they don't care to? Where does the EU get its rare earths products from THEN?
Or, on the flip side, once it decides to shift the cost of the "cleaner" procedures to the customer, and the prices of rare earths products skyrockets. What then?
No, the biggest problems are the cost and the fact that we want them to be run by people more interested in profit than safety. The latter problem is so bad that insurance companies won't touch nuclear power, and we have to have special regulatory agencies to force responsible behaviour, and even they don't work properly.
New reactor designs won't fix these problems.
The cost is a byproduct of the absolutely psychotic level of fearmongering the anti-nuke crowd has done and the ultra-paranoid regulations morass that's been put in place. And you're right, new, safer reactor designs won't fix peo
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Nuke-ninnies
Unfuckingbelievable. Reasonably concerned individuals are "ninnies?" It doesn't matter if the entire earth was covered in nuclear waste, absurdists like you will always say "why is this even news?"
WTF is up with nuke-nutters love-affair with this insanely expensive, forever deadly garbage? THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE MORE EXPENSIVE AND MORE DIRTY THAN NUCLEAR -- once you add up development costs and indefinite waste storage costs. Had we not needed fuel for bombs, and grossly overestimated that need by a fact
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Wow, just wow...
You really should read up on nuclear power, as you have so many misconceptions about it, that it is just hilarious to read that post.
If nuclear waste is hot enough to hurt you, it is hot enough to produce power. The reason we have a nuclear waste issue is because of the reprocessing ban that Jimmy Carter put in place. Nuclear is far cleaner and cheaper when you put cost to society in the equation than almost any other power production method. Only Hydro is cleaner, but there is only so ma
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I think you mean President Carter, the nuclear engineer.
But your strawman (danger) is irrelevant. Nuclear Power fails because of cost, because there is no more expensive way to produce power, not because of how dangerous the waste is once its forgotten about in 200 years.
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My strawman? I was directly refuting your 250-30k year statement. If it is hot enough to need to be buried, it won't last anywhere near that long.
As far as Carter, the nuclear engineer; it doesn't matter what his background is when his fears of reprocessing where someone getting a hold of the output and building bombs or attacking cities (omg terrorists!). These arguments have nothing to do with nuclear, and everything to do with security.
If nuclear costs so much, why is it the cheapest power source even
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Unfuckingbelievable. Reasonably concerned individuals are "ninnies?"
When they stop us from doing what needs doing, and sets us to endless wrangling with no real solution?
FUCK YEAH!
WTF is up with nuke-nutters love-affair with this insanely expensive, forever deadly garbage?
Because it isn't "forever deadly". Sure, the current crop of 50-60 year old tech produces stuff that's hot (lukewarm actually) for tens of thousands of years.
But you're okay with it being stored outside on a fucking parking lot?
When we can produce stuff that's safer, and while it's more radiologically "active" (hot) than the current crop, ITS LIFETIME IS FAR SHORTER (decades or hundreds of years)
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Your argument is fallacious.
Luckily, your simply wanting this to be true in no way alters reality.
The inherent danger of or the damage to the environment of any other power source does not in any way make nuclear more attractive, which has the potential to be far more deadly.
Say it PROPERLY please.
It, in no way, makes it more attractive to YOU.
As for the "potential to be far more deadly". Bullshit. It's a binary equation. Sorry. All the relativism is just scaremongering.
Nuclear power is inherently more expensive than other sources of power, and always has been.
Again, keep saying it. It'll keep NOT being true.
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Again, keep saying it. It'll keep NOT being true.
What makes it true is economics. [wikipedia.org]
Nuclear power is a dog and always has been. What made it so attractive was the need for fuel for nuclear bombs, not the economics of building and safely operating a plant, nor the cost of the power it produces.
Get your head out of your ass. MONEY is
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So you're saying, without a carbon tax, with the other sources of power HEAVILY subsidized by pork, CURRENT low prices in a market the US simply DOES NOT control and with absolutely insane bias against implementation (with accompanying punitive levels of investment required), that Nuclear isn't price competitive. And with anti-nuke nuts going in circles with "This stuff needs reliable storage NOW!" and "Oh! Not THERE!", starting projects they have no intention of completing, and killing projects that alre
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NO. You really need to learn what a strawman argument is.
ALL THINGS BEING EQUAL
no subsidies, no taxes
ABSOLUTE FACT:
Nuclear power is the most expensive way the human race has ever employed to create electricity.
Its great for submarines, and making fuel for bombs, but in commerce, its a dog. Every single other way to manufacture energy is less expensive, given equal development. Yes, even solar. Had 1/10th the resouces been poured into solar energy development, solar would have been at parity with
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And you keep forgetting that things like solar and wind cannot be used as baseline power without VAST implementation changes and an improvement in storage technology of several orders of magnitude.
Plus there's the face that there are places you simply should NOT be putting solar and wind power generation.
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Sorry. But simply defining an argument as a strawman doesn't make it a strawman.
Try harder.
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Again, the sun doesn't shine all the time. And there's no storage grid large enough to actually hold that kind of power. Nor is there a planetary grid to help roll-over power.
And there are places that make solar panels seasonably unfeasible.
In the US, solar provides a scant fraction of total power use. Ramping it up several thousand percent just isn't do-able. It's not affordable for everyone to implement, the US power industry couldn't absorb that power and still afford to rebuild and maintain a grid a
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Re:Why the overreaction? (Score:4, Insightful)
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The lowest tender is the cause. Inevitably every contracted out process will, I repeat, WILL fail, when handed out to the lowest tender because eventually inevitably, you will get stuck with some idiot driven by greed, taking stupid short cuts to increase profits and fines will never ever fix the problem created. Want to minimise risk then never contract out work but do it in house.
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I had the opportunity to hear Nancy speak a few years ago. Something that resonated with me that she said was that errors/accidents (mostly?) occur because people/systems with imperfect information make reasonable (but bad) assumptions... so the only truly "safe/reliable" system is the one where perfect information is being given to the feedback loops to the people/systems who are making operational decisions (obviously not possible for complex, new systems).
Don't confuse power production and nuclear weapons (Score:5, Informative)
The huge (and they _are_ huge) cost of cleanup from places like Hanford has to be understood in the context under which it was created.
The people at Hanford were tasked with creating weapons to kill people, a million at a time. Given that criterion, is it any wonder that they weren't worried about a few salmon, or clean groundwater. They believed at the time that "Nuculer war, toe to toe with the Rooskies" was right around the corner, and they were dealing with the possibility of hundreds of millions of dead. All other reasons just didn't matter.
That turned out not to be the case, but hindsight is always so excellent.
Now, the pendulum has swung so far the other way, we want to clean up Hanford (as an example) well enough that we could build a school on the location. That doesn't seem like a realistic goal. As for a plutonium contaminated waste facility, I should point out that Los Alamos had quite the plutonium problem. They solved it by painting the walls coral - bright bleedin' orange - and then painting over with white paint. The rule was simple - if you see orange, call the safety people. It was (and is) not a perfect solution, but it was (and is) a workable one.
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That turned out not to be the case, but hindsight is always so excellent.
The irony is that some percentage of their goal will be achieved no matter what they intended. It's a fools errand that leads them to believe that they have control over these materials for the geological timeframes that they will exist while they decay.
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Is this a metaphorical solution that I'm not understanding, or an actual solution to a problem that I don't understand. I'm presuming the problem
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I can only guess that the walls were radioactive and they "solved" the problem by encapsulating them with paint. Ironically, it'd probably be the one place where using lead-based paint would be a good thing...
(Actually, I bet they used lead-based bright orange paint to encapsulate the radioactive stuff, then non-lead white paint to encapsulate the lead!)
Re:Why the overreaction? (Score:5, Informative)
Mistakes that "will approach $1 billion".
Except that number is artificially inflated for no reason other than bureaucratic overhead. The nuclear industry is worst of all when it comes to this kind of thing and you can never believe the true numbers for cost of construction, running, and decommissioning of nuclear facilities as those are actually costs of "compliance".
If you don't understand what I mean consider the following very simple example from my work: During routine inspection an electrician identified that a circuit had been hooked up in a way that caused 240V to appear across a metal switch which wasn't earthed. This switch had been pushed in the past and could have killed someone but because there was no path to ground it didn't. It was for cooling tower fans. All that was needed was switching two wires.
Instead we were required to:
Barricade and preserve the area.
Inform the electrical safety office.
Wait for a day for the electrical safety office to send out a team of 5 people to investigate.
Give up the time for the electricians to have interviews with the 5 people from the office.
Prepare and submit corrective action plans ("move that wire over there" wasn't good enough).
Wait for those to be approved.
Engage a 3rd party contractor not related to the site to do the work.
Total time down: 5 days.
Total physical cost including cost of non-inducted 3rd party contractor who needed supervision on site: $4000
Total cost billed to the safety office for their mandated investigation: $20000
Total cost of time lost due to equipment outages, manhours and engineering hours spent during the investigation ~$60000
Actual cost of repair if we could have fixed the problem at the time: $80 (2 people 45minutes).
And this wasn't even a nuclear incident.
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This switch had been pushed in the past and could have killed someone but because there was no path to ground it didn't.
Err... The path to ground is through your body and shoes, or maybe to some other metal object that you happen to be touching at the time. Having 240V (presumably mains AC current) on a switch is insane and extremely dangerous.
More over, the problem with your argument is that it requires someone to determine when strong control and regulation is required and when it isn't. Clearly we disagree over the above example. Even if this were possible and economical, it would probably have negative consequences. One
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Am I missing something? Isn't there a 240V switch in just about everybody's house (e.g., the circuit breaker for something like a dryer, AC or electric oven)?
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Yes, but the switch itself is not at 240V, it's isolated from your finger so you don't get electrocuted...
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Err... The path to ground is through your body and shoes, or maybe to some other metal object that you happen to be touching at the time.
Well yes which is why it was reported as an electrical incident.
The problem is not in the level of reporting, it's the level of administrative overhead which is applied on the resolving actions, and this is the same for the nuclear industry.
I've commissioned large safety systems before. It takes a few months to do. An example of western style nuclear safety can be seen at Lucas Heights. Commissioning of their safety system took 18months. It was quite a bit simpler with simple cause and effect style logic th
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It has created an industry where people extend old unsafe reactor designs rather than superseded them with modern technology. I would not call the industry "safe". The only thing surprising is the few number of accidents that these 40+ year old reactors have had.
You're right we don't know what can be problematic and the commissions and regulations are still required. The problem is the way they manage and their inflexibility. When all you have is a sledge hammer, every problem looks like a small tac, that's
Clarification (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not entirely clear in the summary, but the accident didn't happen at Los Alamos, it happened at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant [wikipedia.org], the $19b pilot plant that is at least in part a replacement for the Yucca Mountain plans.
Also, the original mistake that caused the chemical reaction? They used the wrong kind of cat litter to package the plutonium [npr.org]!
This is surprising to me, as I recall reading about plans for Canadian underground storage of nuclear waste back in the 90s. The plans then were to vitrify it - process it into a glass crystal - so that (a) Terrists couldn't get at it, and (b) it would be inert. I'm kind of amazed that they the DOE is happy with using steel drums and cat litter on their plutonium, though if it works (assuming you get the right kitty litter) then there's no reason to stop using it, I suppose.
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The rather long article touched on this. The NNSA has tried to do this as well as create an MOX fuel reprocessing facility the same as the french, however the NNSA are trying to process weapons grade plutonium which they have not had any success with storing or processing safely apparently. The contractors that seem
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Reprocessing is separate from MOX production.
Presently reprocessing doesn't really do a lot for waste volumes BTW. Used MOX doesn't get reprocessed.
"It was a mistake by an individual..." (Score:5, Insightful)
If a single individual can make a mistake of this magnitude, without it being caught by checks and doublechecks, then the process itself is fragile and flawed. That is a systemic problem and deserves a systemic response.
I'd *really* better not go there (Score:5, Funny)
I was just in the Wieliczka Salt Mine, and that is literally what I did. :-(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W... [wikipedia.org]
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" As long as you don't lick the walls, you can't get any radiation down there. "
Wow, a link to a SciAm article. Let me go read the source. Oh dear, it says absolutely nothing about licking walls. Guess that was just the submitter making stuff up.
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Huh? The submitter didn't make anything up... the quote was clearly from the bottom of this LA Times article, which was their very first link in the summary:
http://www.latimes.com/nation/... [latimes.com]
The SciAm article is just a relevant reference about plutonium poisoning.
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Oh, so it was a quote from James Conca, a nuclear power booster, not Scientific American. That's just plain dishonest.
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how is it dishonest? the source was quoted, it was said. Can't personally comment on how accurate the comment is but in what way is citing a quote with appropriate citation dishonest?
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Speaking of potassium, my favorite part of radioactivity science is the Banana Equivalent Dose:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... [wikipedia.org]
Not just an individual (Score:5, Interesting)
"It was a mistake by an individual"
And the individual's supervisor and the person who trained the individual and the person who devised the individual's test after the training and the person who checked that the test was suitable and the person that did the risk assessment for the work the individual was doing and the person who checked the risk assessment for the work.
There are methods for making sure accidents don't happen, if those methods aren't followed then a lot of people are responsible.
You'd think they could get this stuff right after half a century of dealing with waste.
Could be worse... The Mafia's Deadly Garbage: Italy's Growing Toxic Waste Scandal [spiegel.de]
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Yeah here they just dump it in a swamp in New Jersey.
A comedy? (Score:2)
"The accident was a horrific comedy of errors," says James Conca, a scientific advisor and expert on the WIPP. "
What comedy, there's nothing funny about plutonium leaking. Once it got into the ventilation shafts it got into the air for us to breathe and improve our chances of getting cancer. So the whole so called isolation project was compromised.
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The silly thing is, this is the exact same guy now saying it was just the mistake of an individual. Multiple e-mails were sent which suggested mixing organics with the waste salts while the company asked for it to be looked at by someone who could determine it safe ... nothing got sent to the right people. There isn't even a fucking decent inventory.
Mr. Conca is full of shit.
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Kitty Litter Nuclear Explosion (Score:5, Insightful)
One version I heard was that they changed the kitty litter formulation; this version suggests that they bought organic instead of inorganic [slate.com] kitty litter because of a typo.
Now, there's nothing wrong with using what amounts to kitty litter to do whatever it was being used for. If that does the job, fine.
But whichever of the cases described was true, a problem is that if the stuff they're buying is intended and sold as kitty litter, it's quite possible that the makers may feel at liberty to change the formulation in a way that doesn't effect its use as kitty litter, but massive alters its safety as a "nuclear waste disposal material".
If having organic matter in your kitty litter could inadvertantly turn the nuclear material into a form of radioactive explosive, then you should be damn sure that you're getting the inorganic formulation from a supplier that can guarantee that this is what you're getting. It won't be called "kitty litter" even if that's what- in effect- it is, and it'll probably cost a lot more, but the supplier will (or should be) in the s*** if they supply the wrong type, whereas are Los Alamos going to sue "Pets R Us" for causing a nuclear explosion even if they *did* inadvertantly put organic in an inorganic bag, or change the formulation with insufficient notice (or whatever)?
So this is why (e.g.) the military (for example) might pay a lot more for a given item than you or I might pay over the counter. That, and the fact that they're probably diverting the money to some dubious black ops...!
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Personally, I don't think that's necessarily a bad idea because you often have more control over training/oversight than you do with 3rd parties. However, if this was indeed the problem, then clearly they have taken the savings but not done anything on their side to ensure that they have the right material.
I work in an industry where supply chains are critical to human safety. You don't just buy random stuff off the shelf and put it into your process.
You create specifications for your input materials. You make sure your suppliers manufacture to those specifications. You inspect the supplier from time to time to ensure they are doing due diligence to ensure their materials meet those specifications. And yes, you also do some testing of your own just to make sure that over time things continue to work, that
Posting links to 3.5 year old blog posts (Score:3, Insightful)
Is this what slashdot has come to?
Fine. I'm out. I first got my /. account back in 1998 but this is the last bullshit I'll tolerate. This site is no longer relevant.
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Is this what slashdot has come to?
Fine. I'm out. I first got my /. account back in 1998 but this is the last bullshit I'll tolerate. This site is no longer relevant.
You know, I think I first read something like that twenty years ago.
Why are we treating this like FUKUSHIMA? (Score:2)
Because we're not only dealing with a radiation leak here, we're dealing with an airborne contaminant that just happens to be the most toxic substance known to Man?
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most toxic substance known to man??? their are chemicals where just a drop is enough to kill thousands of people. I would doubt this stuff even rates in the top 10. stuff like botox, ricin, sarin, cyanide and a raft of other chemicals are far more toxic and for the many of them quite common.
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LD50 of nicotine: 10mg (Guinness)
LD50 of caffeine: 160mg (NHS)
LD50 of cocaine sulphate: 80,000mg (NHS)
LD50 of plutonium: 200ug (Cohen)
One fiftieth the amount needed for nicotine, is all the plutonium you need to pretty much guarantee death in half the people exposed.
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LD50 of botox : 1-2ng
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citation needed
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really it would have taken you 10 seconds in google.
http://www.rocketswag.com/reti... [rocketswag.com] (150/70 gives an LD50 of 2.1ng)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... [wikipedia.org]
http://www.allergan.com/assets... [allergan.com]
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Fukushima run by idiots... (Score:3)
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Excellant! You understand the difference btw. technical vs. political/human challenges, unlike 99% here.
It doesn't matter what can be done technically. The fact is, people will fuck it up. That is why complicated technology is sometimes the very wrong choice, when compared to simple technology. Nuclear is complicated, with potentially huge consequences for error.
I'm not anti-nuclear, but very libertarian/capitalist. I'm convinced that if nuclear's externalities were truly priced in, it would be 10-20
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Efficiencies are a major issue with Wind and Solar. I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation a few years ago for powering the state of New Jersey with Solar and estimated that the size of the Solar Panel arrays for this implementation would be approximately the size of the entire state of New Jersey. It could be that solar is 5-10x more efficient than they were at the time I did my guesstimate, but even at those levels Solar doesn't scale like that.
FYI... I recall reading at the time that nuclear power
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Yes, the land area numbers are large. But we shouldn't stifle options such as solar because of falsely thinking that it has to be the sole replacement for all electrical production.
Single family homes seem to have enough roof area to power themselves via solar in most latitudes which are not disproportionately cloudy. This is a no-brainer. That leaves industrial use, which will be powered by the remaining mix of production.
The only solution is price--markets, and freedom--if I want to put up solar pane
Contractor Was Held Responsible! (Score:2)
The problems with the system are obvious but I think it's hilarious that a contractor was finally held responsible for fucking up. I mean, they lost 90% of their contract price for this year because of this accident. Hopefully, this would make them act more properly now that their bottom line is at risk.
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How does massive government subsidies for renewables equate to capitalism? I think that's pretty much the opposite of capitalism.
What I'd like to see is a choice on your electricity bill where you could select which a method of power generation and pay the costs associated with it. By costs associated I mean all costs, be it the cost of backup power generation for renewable or the cost of clean-up operations for minor accidents like this.
If given such a choice I suspect nuclear would be around for a long
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And we're going to remove government indemnification for nuclear power plants too, right? It's simple really--get rid of most of the regulations, in exchange for the requirement that the plants purchase private insurance to a degree acceptable to the nearby PROPERTY OWNERS!
Yeah, it'll be real cheap.
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Sure, if you wanted to simultaneously drive forward both renewable adoption and better reactor design. The US Navy has after all been demonstrating extremely robust and reliable reactors for decades operating in vessels specifically designed to have people try to destroy them. Granted they don't have anywhere near the capacity of a typical landbound reactor, but a cluster of such reactors would compare favorably to your typical coal-fired power plant.
But why should nearby property owners get a disproporti
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"Why should nearby property owners get a disproportionate say?"
Obviously, because risk and property damage potential are roughly inversely proportional to radial distance from the nuclear plant.
How about we give them a choice - ..."
In a civil society, there really is no choice about giving property owners a choice. For protecting life, liberty, and property is the only legitimate purpose of governance, no matter how that is implemented. Property owners out to some cutoff radius should be allowed to sub
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Some interesting thoughts.
One tangential point to think about though:
>For protecting life, liberty, and property is the only legitimate purpose of governance
Life and liberty are all well and good, but wealth (property) facilitates the accumulation of more wealth, which means government-backed property rights will almost inevitably lead to extreme wealth concentration if there's not some other mechanism put in place to counteract it. By not including a fourth, mediating influence of some kind in your "o
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If you want to remove all the Fossil Fuel subsidies, you should also remove all taxes on gasoline, after all, other power doesn't have to pay these taxes.
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Sure, we're going to need to do that eventually anyway as electric vehicles become more popular. How do you feel about a mass and mileage tax instead? We have to pay for road maintenance somehow, and it's only fair that payment reflects usage, at least roughly. And lest you raise the "but everyone benefits from interstate trade routes" argument, yes, they do. And they pay for that benefit in having the transportation taxes factored into the cost of goods at the store.
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You are confused, this facility handles waste from weapons program, power production issue are irrelevant.
The smarter countries in the world are ramping up nuclear power production including bringing online new types of reactors.
Nuclear power is the future for over half the human race. There are some places where renewables make more sense.
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It didn't however get any more reliable - and that's the long term problem with renewables, not their cost per kw/h. So, even if renewable power were free, we'd still need to burn carbon and split atoms until we figure out how to store terawatts of energy.
Re:Renewable energy ist cheaper! (Score:5, Insightful)
"ignore the production costs" - what exactly do you think you're paying for when you buy renewables equipment ?
"ignore the environmental cost of the equipment" - the energy paybacks on all renewables techs are now very low. Concrete usage in wind turbines is not comparably significant (perhaps you're thinking of dams?). Yes, some producers of solar cells, mainly in China, have had bad waste management practices (like a lot of Chinese industry in general). But compared to the amount of power produced over the lifespan of the products, it's quite small.
Anyway, once again we see that the issue with nuclear is rarely lives - it's cost. Nuclear accidents tend to be accidents in slow motion. Excluding any pressure explosions or the like, they generally give you plenty of time to get away without profound health consequences. But the down side is that, being in slow motion, they just keep on going and going, and keep on costing money. They may be in slow motion, but they don't let you just ignore them. You can't just stay in an area with, say, contaminated water and keep drinking it as if nothing's wrong. You can't just keep operating a facility that's suffered an accident as if it never happened. You have to remedy them and it always costs a fortune. And the potential upper bounds on the costs are almost unlimited (picture, say, the cost of a worst-case scenario at Indian Point with winds pointed at NYC - the cost of even a couple week evacuation of NYC is almost unthinkable).
The nuclear industry has long suffered from a very unfortunate problem: a negative learning curve. With most technology, the longer you use and produce it, the cheaper it gets per unit. The nuclear industry has been one of the few industry where the costs have risen with time as people learn more problems in their designs and more risks that haven't been taken into account. And often the only way to address them is with brand new generations of reactors. Which is great, except that now you're starting your learning curve over from scratch, and your system is most commonly even more complicated to boot. It's really been a curse to the industry, and until it goes away, a true "nuclear rennaissance" is never going to occur. And no amount of government limitations on liability, no amount of municipalities forcing costs on to consumers, no amount of anything will really get the "take over the market" takeoff that proponents really want to see.
That's of course not the only problem nuclear has had. Another is the very long lead times on projects. The consequence is that you have to guess long in advance what the electricity market is going to be like. France suffered from this - they significantly overestimated what electricity consumption was going to be when they built most of their nuclear plants, leading to a generation capacity glut. This led to a lot of really inefficient uses of electricity and much higher investment costs than were necessary to meet demand.
Re:Renewable energy ist cheaper! (Score:5, Informative)
Why are people commenting on nuclear power production - TFA was about nuclear weapon production, right? Or am I just confused?
Not to disagree with your points in general, but nuclear power isn't suffering from a negative learning curve so much as we're still using the same plants we built so long ago before we learned all this! Design a modern plant for "keep inevitable accidents cheap and easy to deal with" and you can get just that. Pebble bed, for all that it's a back-of-the-napkin "hey, what if" design, fixes a lot of the common problems (because the common problems are more about fuel/waste management), and is one of many approaches where the operators can't make it melt down no matter how incompetent. Pebble bed still has issues and new failure modes, but it shows the difference in kind we could have if we actually cared.
IMO, the real problem is we've culturally lost the patience for large infrastructure projects. People like rooftop solar because it doesn't require trust in some large organization (government or corporate) to do a job right.
Re:Renewable energy ist cheaper! (Score:5, Informative)
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it's also *chemically* active (usually highly acidic due to nitric acid being used during the plutonium making process)
Wouldn't that be rather trivial to fix, by stirring in some baking soda?
Re:Renewable energy ist cheaper! (Score:4, Insightful)
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nitric acid and tributyl phosphate can form a dangerously explosive polymer called red oil.
Which, in concentrated form, can form a black hole that can devour a whole planet.
Re:Renewable energy ist cheaper! (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a pebble-bed reactor in Jülich, Germany. Guess what, it didn't work as planned, and to make matters worse, it took quite some time to realize that it had not worked as planned. Basically the scope of the disaster was only apparent once the reactor was shut down. One issue is that the reactor radioactively contaminated the ground water beneath it. To what extent is still unknown, because the reactor is also much more radioactive than expected, so dismantling the reactor had to be postponed and with the reactor still standing, a full assessment of the contamination is impossible. This was only a small, scientific reactor, but the list of accidents, management and operative problems and attempts to deny hazards which have been documented [wikipedia.org] already reads like a laundry list of problems so typical of the nuclear industry. The commercial version THTR-300 in Hamm, Germany, was a complete boondoggle. It was an economic disaster for the consortium of companies which were involved in operating the reactor, mainly because a long list of technical problems [wikipedia.org] prevented profitable operation and caused damage which made long-term operability highly unlikely.
The nuclear industry and its fanboys have a habit of deferring safe and cheap nuclear power to future designs, which will make the problems we have with currently operative designs go away. But whenever the future turns into the present, nuclear power still isn't safe and certainly not cheap. Of course then there are new new designs which will make nuclear power safe and cheap, for real this time. Just make sure you keep up with what has been tried and failed already.
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Why are people commenting on nuclear power production - TFA was about nuclear weapon production, right? Or am I just confused?
It is convenient for those with an anti nuke power agenda to conflate the two. Accuracy and truth are secondary, and the ignorance of the media makes it easy. Yes, this has nothing to do with commercial nuclear energy.
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Of course, if not for the weird political issues, that plutonium would be bound for the core of a reactor and not being hastily shoved in a can and put in a special warehouse.
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That's not actually the case. Unlike the grease on your hands (or in the water), the radioactive waste will eventually stop being radioactive all by itself.
It doesn't matter if the container used to re-process fuel becomes contaminated with radiation, it's going to be used to process more waste. Let it glow!
As for the soup, precipitate the Sr90 and dispose of it.
The U.S. doesn't re-process in orser to keep countries lioke India (oops) or Pakistan (oops again) from diverting it to become nuclear powers.
Beyon
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The shutdown was accelerated due to Fukushima and forced reopening several coal plants and building several more. Even worse, many of these were lignite coal, which is the tar sands of coal (polluting and the worst energy for volume).
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Re:Renewable energy ist cheaper! (Score:4, Insightful)
Certainly then, you can us the market prices to dispose of high level nuclear waste and to purchase insurance sufficient to protect the property owners to the affected radii of the various levels of accidents?
Otherwise, what you are really saying is that it's cheap if the government indemnifies the nuclear power industry and shoves the risk down the throats of property owners, who will never recover their losses if a real accident occurs.
As well as allowing the industry to leave the waste sitting above ground forever, potentially wiping out large swaths of land and/or humanity under various, very plausible scenarios that may occur on timescales that cover millions of years. But of course, you neglect responsibility for those possibilities.
I don't support neglecting the "external" costs of coal power production, either.
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Can you imagine the horror show that would result from inadequate oversight? We insist on using for-profit companies to build our nuclear reactors - companies who make more money the more corners they cut. Companies whose management is not answerable to the people in any way. Companies that won't develop contingency plans because it's "too expensive", and without proper regulation there are no consequences.
We have a private company o
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Renewable energy isn't going to take us to Mars
Actually, methane synthesis using renewable electricity is quite conceivable.
Re: Renewable energy ist cheaper! (Score:4, Informative)
Or reprocessing.
The thing about radioactive material is that anything dangerously radioactive doesn't last long - the radiation comes from unstable elements decaying into stable ones, so the more radioactive something is the shorter the time period you need to worry about. Highly radioactive material is not a disposal problem - it mostly decays to background radiation levels in seconds or hours, maybe months on the outside. Yes, it blasts everything around it with radiation in the process - but leave it in a properly shielded "cooling room" for a while and you can then bury it in your vegetable garden without ill effects (well, aside from any chemical toxicity issues). At the other end of the scale, anything with a sufficiently long half-life (like nuclear fuel) will be around practically forever, but that's because it's decaying very slowly, and thus not producing very much radiation at all.
Moderately radioactive nuclear waste is the real danger - it's radioactive enough to be seriously dangerous, but not radioactive enough to decay quickly. Usually you're talking decades, maybe a few centuries for it to decay to background levels. This covers most of what we usually think of as "nuclear waste" - the fission products of a nuclear reaction. Still, bury it in a vault for a few centuries and the problem goes away.
So where do these 100,000 year numbers come from? Well, currently we do something really, *really* stupid: we don't just bury the radioactive stuff, we also include all the nuclear fuel that was still unused when the reaction slowed down enough that they decided to refuel. So now you've got a vault filled with decaying nuclear waste and lots and lots of nuclear fuel, which fissions when exposed to the radiation from the decaying waste, producing more fresh waste to replace the stuff that decays. Eventually you run out of fuel, but it takes you many thousands of years for that to happen.
The solution? Reprocessing. Separate the unused fuel from the waste before disposal. Then you've got new fuel and mid-level radioactive waste, neither of which is a long-term problem. Such reprocessing was actually the norm in the early days of nuclear energy, but then advances in uranium mining reduced the cost of fresh fuel to the point that reprocessing was no longer cost effective and we stopped doing it. Now granted, reprocessing is a nasty, dangerous process itself, but it's a process by which we can convert the basically unsolvable problem of long-term waste storage into something we can handle. And it's a technology that's been largely ignored for many decades, so it could probably be made far safer and more cost-effective, if there was a business reason to do so. What with fuel being only about 5% of the lifetime cost of a fission reactor, it's mostly poorly constructed economic incentives that keep us pushing massive costs onto future generations rather than simply solving the problem today for a comparative pittance.
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Are you trying to say that the French are doing it incorrectly? Perhaps you should enlighten them on how to do it properly since you know so much more than everyone else about how to do it.
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Yeah. Also, unfortunately, "reprocessing" gets a bad rap due to PUREX which, while better than no reprocessing at all from a waste perspective, is still pretty bad.
The pyroprocessing process used as part of the IFR design had great potential - there was a good chance that it would have been able to fuel the USA for 1-2 centuries using only the existing LWR reactor waste stockpiles. The waste from the IFR would be incredibly dangerous - but only for 100-200 years and MUCH lower in volume compared to the am
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Fukushima cost more (Score:4, Informative)