Six of Hanford's Nuclear Waste Tanks Leaking Badly 221
SchrodingerZ writes "A recent review of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state (where the bulk of Cold War nuclear material was created) has found that six of its underground storage tanks are leaking badly. Estimations say each tank is leaking 'anywhere from a few gallons to a few hundred gallons of radioactive material a year.' Washington's governor, Jay Inslee, said in a statement on Friday, 'Energy officials recently figured out they had been inaccurately measuring the 56 million gallons of waste in Hanford's tanks.' The Hanford cleanup project has been one of the most expensive American projects for nuclear cleanup. Plans are in place to create a treatment plant to turn the hazardous material into less hazardous glass (proposed to cost $13.4 billion), but for now officials are trying just to stop the leaking from the corroded tanks. Today the leaks do not have an immediate threat on the environment, but 'there is [only] 150 to 200 feet of dry soil between the tanks and the groundwater,' and they are just five miles from the Colombia River."
Nothing To Worry About (Score:5, Insightful)
These radioactive leaks are nothing to worry about. All it takes for Congress to actually do something about proper funding, regulations & oversight is a major disaster. How many people have been killed so far? None? Um, well, gee, I guess we'll have to wait until a lot of people die, or a politician or celebrity gets sick.
Re:Nothing To Worry About (Score:5, Interesting)
Regulations? This was a government-run site!
As to funding, they are actively cleaning up the site.
Oversight is another mystery - the cleanup is being done by a collaboration between the Department of Energy, the EPA, and Washington State. You have 3 distinct agencies from both state and federal governments "overseeing" the project.
Re: (Score:2)
Wait, doesn't the government do the regulating? When the government is running the show, who the heck is the regulator?
Re:Nothing To Worry About (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, but.... government is not monolithic. NRC is not hand in glove with EPA, for instance. Each branch and agency has its own fiercely-defended rice bowl. I'm not saying collusion isn't possible, only that it's not automatic.
Re: (Score:3)
There are already 3 agencies jointly overseeing the site, including one that is a state agency. Are you suggesting another would solve the problems there?
Re: (Score:2)
Wait, doesn't the government do the regulating? When the government is running the show, who the heck is the regulator?
This is what happens when the "should be regulated" dictate to the "should be regulating", the people lose and the planet loses as well. Thanks alot for Fuckyoushima, assholes.
Re: (Score:2)
Wait, doesn't the government do the regulating? When the government is running the show, who the heck is the regulator?
Well, it was a Cold War nuclear project, so I guess the other regulating agency would have been the Soviet Union. .... nowdays I guess it's Al-Qaeda?
And then the Cold War ended.
Re:Nothing To Worry About (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
But the government was in charge, so they could have called in such advisers if they cared.
Re:Nothing To Worry About (Score:5, Insightful)
Unbelievably, the responses so far are that the government wasn't being overseen by enough other government. Of course, then you need government to oversee the government that oversees the government.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
So...just throw in a random xkcd link and get automatic +2 mod? Oh mighty /., how far you have fallen.
Uh... a user with a low number like 897 most likely gets a +4 just for pooping in their pants on /. So, AC, you can rest easy in the knowledge that they actually got modded down
Re: (Score:3)
Hanford [wikipedia.org] is not just any nuclear plant. There were 9 reactors built there between 1943 and 1963 to produce Plutonium-239 and Uranium-233 for the US nuclear weapons programs. Most of the waste in these tanks is not from the reactors themselves but leftovers from the Pu-239 extraction process, not something power reactors have to deal with. All that's stored at power reactors are spent fuel rods (a problem but not nearly as nasty as the stuff at Hanford).
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, I'm well aware of the Federal Government's ability to conflate civilian and military. Sort of gets to my point - the government is a terrible regulator of itself.
Re:Nothing To Worry About (Score:5, Funny)
SImple.... all we need is to get some congressional aid to slip language into a bill (since they don't read them anyway) requiring congressmen to do a walking tour of each nuclear site at least every 5 years. Garaunteed everything is squeeqy clean and no longer hot in 4 years.
That or there would be an emergency session of congress to remove the requirement for national security reasons.
Re: (Score:2)
...but for now officials are trying just to stop the leaking from the corroded tanks.
I'll stop worrying when the officials will literally try themselves to stop the leaking (and, of course... video clip or it didn't happen)
Re:Nothing To Worry About (Score:5, Interesting)
Pretty much. I live there. Don't work there but have lots of friends who do. The leak has been known for a while and this story is just finally starting to reach critical mass (ha!) now that we have a new governor that takes it more seriously. The immediate solution is for them to stop cutting funding -- we have 2/3rds of all the high level waste spills here and we get 1/3rd of the cleanup money. It goes back and forth we red tape and lawsuits with the contractors not meeting goals because they don't have funding, so the govt tries to penalize, they try to sue back due to lack of funding... nothing gets done.
A *real* solution here involves our politicians getting off their asses and coming up with a permanent storage solution, which will never happen. Nobody wants that in their back yard. The vitrification plant? I have a friend who's a lead engineer out there and they're making it up/solving problems AS THEY GO. They're not even sure if it's going to work yet! There's no detailed plan, although to be fair that's how the Manhattan project ran in the first place.
Also, Hanford was much more than refining the plutonium for the Fat Man bomb. In fact that reactor is clean, they give tours now (I've been inside it). They invented the process and refined the majority of the stuff for everything in our nuclear arsenal now, and it had several experimental reactors out there to test breeder reactors, fast flux reactors, making medial isotopes, etc. A few of which were never even finished.
Killing people by the Millions (Score:5, Insightful)
We shouldn't take Hanford as a prototypical example of "The Nuclear Industry."
Remember, the people who planned, funded, and ran Hanford were in the process of building devices -designed- to kill people by the millions, and designed to be used in circumstances when people, by the millions, were dying here in the USA. Perhaps we should not forgive them, but we should understand their attitude that poisoning a few workers or a few thousand fish was just not on their radar. This was, in their understanding, war.
What Hanford was, and is, is a very brutal view of the simple fact that in war, lots of people are hurt, maimed, killed, poisoned, burned, and other forms of mayhem committed upon them.
Now, we as a nation and as a world, have the responsibility and opportunity to clean up our own mess, a mess that was caused by people who sincerely believed that a philosophical point and an economic model was worth murdering countless people. If nothing else, we need to learn from these experiences. We need to not forget that matters of ideology and economic theory do not count as much as living, suffering humans.
Re: (Score:2)
They were not that fatalistic, and in fact designed the containment tank properly. What they didn't count on is massive cuts to funding and inadequate inspection/maintenance. They probably expected someone to come along and do something about the waste well before now, emptying the tanks.
As human beings we seem to be incapable of dealing with problems this long term effectively. No matter how good out intentions the next time the economy tanks or someone needs to dole out a tax cut to get into office it all
Re: (Score:3)
We shouldn't take Hanford as a prototypical example of "The Nuclear Industry."
Um, actually, since Hanford was literally a nuclear prototyping facility, I'd say it's about as prototypical an example as you can get...
Re:Nothing To Worry About (Score:5, Informative)
You're cynical about congress. But, people really don't vote for these issues in any kind of numbers. Not when there are much more important single wedge issues to get irate about. Also, people don't want to be informed about this until it starts retarding babies or dramatically increasing cancer rates. And then, they seem to only think it happens to them when it happens to them.
I much more blame the electorate than congress for this lack of attention. If we took a million people to the capital building, or wrote a million letters, or even wrote a million emails, we might get some attention paid to this issue.
Z
Re:Nothing To Worry About (Score:5, Insightful)
I, the voter, have a full-time job and don't have the time to learn about all these issues in detail. The whole point of electing representatives is that it becomes their job. They can devote the time that I cannot, to learn about these issue in detail so they can make an informed decision on it. Whether it be a vote on a bill, or even just deciding what's important and what's not.
If I were well-informed enough to vote on this type of issue, we wouldn't need to elect representatives. We could just hold a direct electronic democratic vote by the entire electorate on each individual issue.
So it's either a failure by our representatives, or a failure of our system of government. It is not a failure of the electorate.
Re:Nothing To Worry About (Score:5, Insightful)
Reality is, it's likely that it's not the radioactivity that's most dangerous. The real issue is heavy metals and those things generally containing entire heavy end of periodic table. Stuff that is REALLY toxic.
Radioactivity from a little leak into a huge river is nonexistent in terms of danger. Toxic heavy metals on the other hands can poison a river even with fairly small presence.
Re: (Score:3)
Not sure why this is regarded as "leakinng badly" though...
Six tanks leaking at rates of a few to a few hundred gallons PER YEAR doesn't seem like a serious leak.
The problem should definitely be dealt with, but we're talking replacing only six tanks (each holding "tens of thousands of gallons" (not "millions") of radioactive wastes), pumping the old tanks' contents into the new tanks, then disposing of the old tanks and cleaning up under them to the extent that's practical.
In other words, TFS blows the
Yucca Mountain (Score:4, Insightful)
How much of this could have been avoided if Harry Reid and President Obama had not derailed the Yucca Mountain project? And if groups like Greenpeace weren't so effective in opposing solutions to nuclear waste storage? They cheered the end of the Yucca Mountain project and called its supporters morons. Where are we now?
Re:Yucca Mountain (Score:5, Informative)
Yucca Mountain was designed to store wastes AFTER they had been immobilized and put in long-term storage casks.
The problem here is that they haven't even started that first step. This is still millions of gallons of raw liquid waste, in a state that is totally unsuitable for interstate transport and burial. If Yucca Mountain were up and running today, it wouldn't help this problem one bit.
If they actually took the initiative to solidify this waste now and put it in casks, they could safely store it on site for decades or centuries, just like they're currently doing with commercial reactor waste. They don't need something like Yucca Mountain to address the current risks.
Re: (Score:2)
It is easier to solidify it after the short lived and intense radionuclides have decayed in a decade or two and the waste cools down. In the meantime storage of the rods in ponds provides a cheaper way of cooling the rods. If it was vitrified hot it would probably crack the container. If we could actually separate the short lived radionuclides from the long lived radionuclides and burn them in a reactor of course none of this longwinded crap would be necessary. However all R&D work on it has been stoppe
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
How much of this could have been avoided if Harry Reid and President Obama had not derailed the Yucca Mountain project? And if groups like Greenpeace weren't so effective in opposing solutions to nuclear waste storage? They cheered the end of the Yucca Mountain project and called its supporters morons. Where are we now?
Nothing at all. The problem is that you cannot remove these materials from the tanks easily. The encasing in glass would have been just as necessary for Yucca Mountain storage as it is for some different shorter term storage. For some of these tanks it is not even known what is in them, there is a harder-than-concrete crust on top, and explosion at any time (chemical, not nuclear) is a real possibility. The whole facility is one gigantic mess, and Obama has zero responsibility for that.
Re:Yucca Mountain (Score:5, Informative)
No it isn't, with even a cursory look into the situation. Yucca mountain was for spent fuel rods from commercial plants. This disaster area is the leftover crap from reprocessing fuel to extract the Plutonium. Yucca mountain was primarily for commercial reactors - this was a government-run site.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
From the Wikipedia for Yucca, Yucca Mountain was...
...for spent nuclear reactor fuel and other high level radioactive waste...
(Italics added)
In the Nuclear Industry, the byproducts of the Plutonium production situation at Hanford is what we would refer to as high level radioactive waste.
Re:Yucca Mountain (Score:5, Insightful)
Yucca mountain could not handle the millions of gallons of waste at Hanford, even if you could find a a way to transport it safely. The largest-scale part of the problem is the roughly 10x20 mile patch of contaminated groundwater, for which Yucca would do nothing.
But step back from numbers for a moment and just use some reasoning... if they can pick it up and bring it to Yucca, then it's not an expensive cleanup issue, is it? Sure, it's no fun to build on-site storage - but it certainly doesn't have much to with cleanup.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Millions of gallons can be converted into a smaller volume through chemical reprocessing of the materials. Imagine if every time you took a shit, the water that was in the toilet was instantly put in a tank and designated part of the "waste" produced by you.
This is similar to the situation at Hanford - had reprocessing not been outlawed we wouldn't have had to (and still could go back and fix) this political problem of storing the ENTIRE waste byproduct.
Re: (Score:2)
No they don't. If you read the article you linked, you will see they are talking about spent nuclear fuel - same as me.
Re: (Score:2)
Where do you think that nuclear materials go when they're done with? The Federal government has been sending more materials to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation for decades, but refuses to pay the costs associated with cleaning up the stuff that was improperly stored there in the past.
Yucca Mountain was supposed to take a lot of the waste that the government wants to continue sending to HNR.
Re:Yucca Mountain (Score:5, Interesting)
How do you propose moving millions of gallons of nuclear waste to Yucca mountain? The primary problem at Hanford is cleanup, not storage. When it's all sitting in secure containers, ready to move to a storage facility... then we'll talk about Yucca mountain. Hundreds of other (commercial, private, though heavily regulated) facilities manage to store their nuclear waste without contaminating groundwater. The government does owe private industry a storage facility, but it sure would be nice for them to demonstrate that they can operate one.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Never mind that; what if they hadn't wasted so much money on "stimulus" this cleanup would be paid for many times over.
Either that, or the recession would have been much longer and more severe, and we'd be much deeper in the hole now than we are.
Re: (Score:2)
Nuclear Power, here to stay ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
LWRs produce plutonium as a byproduct.
...and then this Plutonium is contained within the Spent Nuclear Fuel on-site until another Yucca Mountain proposal goes through or we recycle the material.
Hanford's original purpose was solely to produce weapons grade Plutonium (different than a small amount of Plutonium in spent fuel) for use in the weapons program. The resulting waste was stored in these canisters which are being mentioned in the article. Just because two different actions of man utilize the same resource does not mean that their intenti
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Another one-sentence post, somehow instantly modded up.
Anyways, I'll bite.
What makes you want to get rid of this material? Plutonium, sure it has a long half-life, but is that a bad thing? As a transuranic artificial element, Plutonium is one of the most expensive materials on Earth primarily in the fact that you can't put a price on it in many cases. So now you may ask, "So what if it costs a lot. Things can cost a lot and not be useful."
How excited were you and the rest of this Slashdot community when th
Re: (Score:3)
The only point I was wishing to make was simply that once the genie is out of the bottle, you're committed. That's true whether it's handguns, fracking or nuclear power; there will be consequences and those selling the product will attempt to obscure tradeoffs with a "win-win" marketing ploy. The nuclear industry is one that has long been writing checks the public has had to cover, as your posts backhandedly expose.
John Tyndall demonstrated the effect on energy absorption gas composition had, some 152 year
Re:Nuclear Power, here to stay ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Different kinds of plutonium -- Pu-238 is made in special isotope reactors by exposing Neptunium targets to a neutron flux and this is the isotope that is used in radiotethermal generators (RTGs) as carried by the Curiosity rover, the Cassini probe, the Voyager probes etc. It has a short halflife (87 years) and emits a lot of decay heat but only releases alpha radiation making it easy to shield.
Power reactors produce Pu-239 and Pu-240 by adding neutrons to U-238 which makes up 95% plus of fresh nuclear fuel rods. Most of the Pu produced this way is fissioned during the fuel burn cycle but there's always some left when refuelling is carried out. Reprocessing of fuel allows this Pu to be removed and/or recycled into MOX (Mixed Oxide) fuel elements along with fresh U-235.
Reprocessing of power station fuel was thought to be a nuclear weapons proliferation danger until it was realised that regular light-water reactor designs, the most common power generating choice, produced fuel hopelessly contaminated with Pu-240 which caused any attempt to build a weapon to be so problematic that it was simpler for any nation wanting nukes to develop separate non-power reactor facilities to produce purer forms of Pu-239 by short-cycle exposure of U-238 metal to neutrons.
The reprocessing ban in the States was overturned by the Reagan administration, I believe but it's a very expensive process to carry out and freshly-mined uranium is very cheap. The growing costs of storage may encourage the US to take up reprocessing in the future, to deal with the Hanford mess if nothing else, since reprocessing reduces the volume of actual waste considerably -- a reactor refuelling operation usually involves a hundred tonnes of fuel elements but less than a tonne of that will be actual waste actinides after storage for a couple of years in a spent fuel pool to allow the more active and dangerous short-halflife materials to decay away. Anyone thinking of investing a few billion in a reprocessing plant has to consider that a future administration might arbitrarily reinstate the Carter-era reprocessing ban. Other nations such as France, Russia, Britain and Japan which reprocess fuel are more stable politically speaking and so can commit to long-term planning for this sort of operation.
Re: (Score:3)
How is this modded down?
Not to diss /., but pretty much all of us know there is a large population of ignorant (meant in the nicest way; honest) people inhabiting the place, just like the rest of our little bit of the Universe. I've been watching this slow-mo trainwreck (Hanford) for more than two decades, intently watched the Yucca Mountain comedy show, and am still amazed that so little progress has been made in either in all that time.
This's how the USA works these days. This ain't the USA of 1941 or the '50s. Damn, I feel o
Re: (Score:2)
It's all in the point of view. An idiot could gather up this waste and use it as a weapon, or sneak a real nuke onto the site and threaten to detonate, spewing all this lovely stuff into the atmosphere. Nuclear power can theoretically become a nuclear weapon. Sadly, the reverse is not true.
Re: (Score:3)
Nuclear power can theoretically become a nuclear weapon. Sadly, the reverse is not true.
Actually, there have been proposals to use smallish nuclear weapons to super-heat a giant underground reservoir to super-heated steam, using that to run a power-plant. You can (in theory) set it up so the shockwave is absorbed before it reaches the containment walls.
Addie the Atom Says... (Score:5, Interesting)
"Clean, safe and .too cheap to meter!"
Is there any reason why we shouldn't reduce our current nuclear arsenal to something less than 1000 warheads, instead of replacing them with new ones? Can anyone think of a plausible situation where we would need 1000 nuclear warheads?
Re: (Score:2)
when the evil space aliens come we need more than just 1000 nukes to blow up their giant space ships
Seriously though Yucca mountian was a new design facility for long term storage, not the temporary storage that currently exists
Re: (Score:3)
when the evil space aliens come we need more than just 1000 nukes to blow up their giant space ships
Seriously though... (grin)... for evil aliens, we know Slim Whitman is enough (unless RIAA sends a C&D/DMCA take down letter). The only use for them would be to hit asteroids, with no space shuttles and Bruce Willis close to the retirement, they are useless.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd say you need to do both. Reduce the number, but also keep updating the tech for the remainder that you do keep around.
Interestingly, the Obama administration seems to be seeking a non-treaty path with Russia to warhead reduction. They seem to be doing this because of all the trouble they had getting the last START treaty through congress.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, the GOP pretty much left him hanging. START was a good idea, but the concerns being voiced were absolutely ludicrous.
Re: (Score:2)
The GOP screwed him, but that is to be expected. What I think he did not expect was the heads of the Energy Department labs pushing against him. In the end, he had to concede to modernization - which I don't think he wanted but it kept the labs open longer. I hate government waste, but I have to admit that it probably makes sense to employ the nuclear weapons experts.
Re: (Score:2)
Of course that's what we should do.
We could easily cut the number of nukes we have in half, and if we kept them updated we wouldn't sacrifice one bit of national defense.
For the life of me, I can't understand how we rationalized having this big a nuclear arsenal. I guess it was just a numbers game, where if we had 1000, and the Russians had 1001, we just had to have 1002 or we just were
Re: (Score:2)
The rationale was that you had to have enough surviving warheads to counterattack. So, if the Soviets managed to knock out every bomber and every missile silo in a massive nuclear attack, at least enough of our missile subs should have survived to wipe out the Soviet Union. If an initial attack had a fighting chance of getting rid of most of your opponent's missiles, then MAD goes out the window. It used to be measured in tens of thousands, so we've actually made a lot of progress.
Re: (Score:2)
They were built on the assumption thar a lot of them might be destroyed or otherwise fail due to missile defence systems etc. The is massive overprovisioning for things like submarines that carry enough to take out a country on their own.
No country really needs that many any more.
Re: (Score:3)
You need enough that you won't need to use them. The world is fairly peaceful right now - the old threat of Russia dimmed, China seems intent on ecodenomic success rather than military conquest for their future, and any other nuclear power the US is on generally good terms with. But you can't be sure that'll stay forever. What'll happen if, in ten years, a Russian president comes to power on an anti-west platform, calling for a return to the glory days? Or if North Korea gets nuclear weapons? If that happe
Re: (Score:3)
Actually, due to ouir improved technology fro delivering the nukes in teh event of war, we have more than we will ever need now. Once you convert the enemy to a field of glass, more nukes don't matter.
Re: (Score:2)
"Clean, safe and .too cheap to meter!"
Is there any reason why we shouldn't reduce our current nuclear arsenal to something less than 1000 warheads, instead of replacing them with new ones? Can anyone think of a plausible situation where we would need 1000 nuclear warheads?
They actually are cannibalizing old ones to maintain the stockpile because we no longer have facilities to create new weapons and parts of the bombs degrade. It's one of the reasons both the US and Russia have been for reductions. I think the number of weapons is a third of what it was at the height of the Cold War.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
You do realize that quote was in reference to a fusion project, not fission. I know Harry Shearer doesn't, I'd hope you take the time to learn a little something.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_cheap_to_meter [wikipedia.org]
Oh, and electricity production does not necessarily lead to nuclear warheads.
Re: (Score:2)
You do realize that quote was in reference to a fusion project, not fission. I know Harry Shearer doesn't, I'd hope you take the time to learn a little something.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_cheap_to_meter [wikipedia.org]
Oh, and electricity production does not necessarily lead to nuclear warheads.
And that phrase was used by proponents of nuclear (fission) power for years until they actually built out commercial scale plants and decided they'd needed to get the billions of dollars from somewhere.
Re: (Score:3)
The "too cheap to meter" phrase was used by opponents of nuclear power, not proponents -- after all it didn't apply to fission power plants.
Nuclear power is very cost-competitive with the cheapest coal-fired power stations but they need a big wadge of cash up front to build them. Over the expected 60-year lifespan of modern GenIII designs at 90% operational availability the electricity they generate will cost about 4 to 5 cents/kWh including reactor construction, fuel production, fuel waste handling, oper
Re: (Score:2)
Because the period of MAD was the most peaceful period in human history. Look at the body count websites before and after the cold war and you can see the chilling effect MAD had on war and genocide.
Local wars were local and not world wide in scale. Nuclear weapons are terrible, conventional arms have them outclassed in every real world measure like body counts though.
Re: (Score:2)
I can: When this is really covert gift/bribe money for industry and the military.
Re: (Score:2)
You first.
I, personally, would rather stay on the 'ignorant' side of that particular experiment.
Re: (Score:2)
You are nuts.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
A minor nuclear war with each country using 50 Hiroshima-sized atom bombs as airbursts on urban areas could produce climate change unprecedented in recorded human history. A nuclear war between the United States and Russia today could produce nuclear winter, with temperatures plunging below freezing in the summer in major agricultural regions,
So what you're saying is, science has solved the Global Warming problem? Excellent thinking from our boys in the white coats! Huzzah!
Reframing... (Score:3)
The Hanford cleanup project has been one of the most expensive American projects for nuclear cleanup. Plans are in place to create a treatment plant to turn the hazardous material into less hazardous glass (proposed to cost $13.4 billion), but for now officials are trying just to stop the leaking from the corroded tanks.
Don't think of it as a nuclear waste clean-up project, environmental fiasco, or other government boondoggle. Consider it a gift of a $13.4 billion dollar jobs program. ;-) (one with reeeeeally high stakes if it's screwed up).
One Word (Score:2)
STOP LEAK
OK, maybe that is two words, but it works in my car radiator. I would imagine Bardahl would donate a few thousand gallons just for the publicity.
Re: (Score:2)
STOP LEAK
OK, maybe that is two words, but it works in my car radiator. I would imagine Bardahl would donate a few thousand gallons just for the publicity.
Relax this car 'aint goin' noplace. Blackie Carbon
Re: (Score:2)
A bit of history on Bar's Leaks - http://www.barsproducts.com/company/history [barsproducts.com]
I remember reading in the book (forgot title; I think it was before "Nautilus Ninety North" though) there'd been a leak in a secondary steam condensing loop of the reactor in Nautilus (SSN-571) while she was in transit from the Canal to Hawaii and on to Greenland by way of the North Pole.
The Navy and Westinghouse had had teams of engineers aboard trying to isolate and stop the leak, none
Hanford and Modern Nuclear Power (Score:3)
There is no relationship (other than historical) between the manufacturing processes and waste at Hanford, and modern nuclear power plants .
Indeed the problems in Japan would certainly be almost impossible with current designs.
Re:Hanford and Modern Nuclear Power (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed the problems in Japan would certainly be almost impossible with current designs.
We should really deal with the problems at hand rather than espouse the virtues of things that do not yet exist. In fact, a non-negligible percentage of currently operating nuke plants in the US absolutely could suffer a catastrophic disaster like Fukushima –not from tsunami, but from earthquake or perhaps terrorism, and in a similar fashion (if the plant loses power and it isn't restored before the batteries die, they'll experience the same form of meltdown).
Please come up with a safe solution for current problems, and cease the handwaving dismissal of these problems because more modern on the drawing board designs won't have the same flaws. Building a plant that can't melt down like Fukishima does NOTHING to fix the damage done by Fukushima or the very real possibility of a Fukushima-scale accident occurring at currently operating plants.
Common sense (Score:2)
My understanding (Score:4, Interesting)
Talking with the guys that do this at a job fair.
First, what could take so freaking long to clean stuff up? "Stuff you don't understand." Right, bureaucracy, nothing else.
Anyway, the waste from Hanford was stored in Single-Shelled Tanks (SSTs), until they later started storing it in Double-Shelled Tanks (DST's). The SST's are leaking, we know this, so this is not news. What's currently being done is pumping the waste from the leaking SST's into the DST's and cleaning the SST's. They do this because the vitrification plant is not built yet.
They're out of DST's. So now they have to decide whether to build more DST's or expedite the vit plant. Basically a few million dollars now, a few billion dollars now, or a few million dollars now AND a few billion dollars later.
I got to school at the WSU campus nearby, and this is all I've been able to get someone to tell me. Correct me if I'm wrong. I probably am.
Oh. Right. Safety. This stuff's NASTY. That's been holding it up for over 20 years.
The 'Colombia' River? (Score:2)
Unsolvable problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The nuclear waste problem was the biggest driver for germany's nuclear exit decision, for 30 years this was discussed and determined to be basically unsolvable. (The incident in japan led to a re-think of the exit-of-the-exit decision, but the doubts about waste handling had been there at all times).
To me, this is nuclear's biggest threat, and whenever I see discussions on slashdot this does not really seem to be an issue to US citizens at all. Why is this the case? Are these problems properly addressed in school and media? In germany, we have constantly very critical journalism regarding nuclear waste disposal, as we also have a site where waste is leaking and this proves to be a huge and expensive problem. Generally, storing waste for 10.000 years in a safe manner is not considered to be possible. (And think about the costs which occur in those timelines).
When reading slashdot, I always get the impression that people still think nuclear has a future, and that we simply have not got the right technology in place yet. To me, nuclear has been a dead end for years, and its only a matter of time that everyone needs to switch to renewables (which would happen in 20 years max). Is nuclear really considered as a real option by the general US population? Are the implications properly educated? Total costs of waste disposal and storage and the risks which remain?
Regards,
Lars
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
whenever I see discussions on slashdot this does not really seem to be an issue to US citizens at all. Why is this the case? Are these problems properly addressed in school and media?
The mess at Hanford is the result of experimentation in all kinds of processing, reactor construction, and handling. It's the byproduct of learning how to do this safely and what works and what doesn't. When the worst waste was produced mainly in the 40s and 50s, there was no practical knowledge or experience with any of this. As usual, we bore the brunt of the cost and effort of figuring all the basics out, while everybody else shows up after the heavy lifting is done.
Re:Unsolvable problem (Score:4, Informative)
It's not at all unsolvable. The waste we're talking about here is not nuclear power leftovers and is not the result of modern methods.
All of this is leftovers from weapons manufacturing. It is the problem it is because at the time, getting the weapons made at any cost was the priority. Nobody at the time cared how much waste it produced or in what form.
A responsible power program will take the 'spent' fuel and reprocess it into new fuel rods (95% of the material) and a highly radioactive waste in solid form (the other 5%) that will decay in 200-500 years. At that point, it will be less radioactive than the uranium ore that was dug out of the environment in the first place.
We could build several modern reactors and power them on nothing but the existing stockpile of not really spent fuel we have sitting in dry storage. The result would be a net reduction of the amount of nuclear waste in the world.
Re: (Score:3)
Like most technically solvable problems that don't get solved, the problem is political.
France is quite actively doing the "impossible" [wikipedia.org] right now. The output of 2/3 of one of their reactors is enough to handle the fuel cycle for all of their reactors plus the reprocessing they do for other countries.
Again, Hanford was a weapons facility that had no concerns for such "minor details" as safe disposal or sustainability. It's entire purpose was to make sure we had more bombs than the USSR. Meanwhile, most thing
Re: (Score:2)
Americans believe whatever they're told to believe because there is no "validation" process for good ideas that interacts with either the real world or the intelligentsia. In essence, America's two party political systems means that industry groups can prevent important positions from gaining any traction.
In Germany, the proportional system means that small parties can form around important ideas and elect at least a few people. These seats represent lost jobs for major political parties, who then must co
ancient news (Score:2)
Reread the '50s and '60s pro-nuke propaganda (Score:2)
This might be a good time to reread the pro-nuke propaganda put out by the government in the '60s and '70s. This kind of thing would never happen . . ..
Think about that propaganda in the current-day context of global warming and pollution propaganda.
Civilian Versus Military (Score:4, Insightful)
I read once that 98% of America's high level nuclear waste comes from military programs.
Why is it then that 98% of the hot air voiced is about civilian uses?
Re: (Score:2)
WHY THE HANFORD MATTERS TO FISHERMEN (Score:3)
http://www.pcffa.org/fn-sep02.htm [pcffa.org]
2002: Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations
Nonsense. It's leaking quite well. (Score:2)
It's just that we don't like the results much.
Also known as L.U.S.T. (Score:2)
That stands for Leaking Underground Storage Tanks. Welcome to New Jersey, Washington state. Good luck cleaning it up.
What we need to know is... (Score:2)
Geez people, yadda yadda yadda. Hanford's been around for decades, all the babble has been repeated countless times. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent there already, so ...
What we need to know is: how far downstream from the Hanford site is the first river radiation monitor? Where are the records for that monitor stored? Where is the website for that monitor's current status? In the event that it begins to monitor increases (particularly significant ones), who is going to respond, what is thei
Glass wasn't good enough in the 1970s (Score:2)
Budget Cuts (Score:2)
Just imagine how a project like this will be impacted with the start of Sequestration...everything gets cut, across the board. You think loss to the Military Budget will be hard to swallow, what about the budgets that clean these messes up, or prevent these messes in the first place, with inspections and so forth?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Harry did the right thing. Yucca mountain was one of several sites being evaluated for desirable geological characteristics since the early 90's...one of 3 I think.
The original plan was that one of the 3 sites would be chosen based solely on technical merits however that was wishful thinking and in the end Yucca mountain was chosen because the politician from the other more populated states successfully shutdown those options because they of course do not want nuclear waste stored in their "back yards". S
Re: (Score:2)
I'm a fan of Columbia Crest wines, they make a great $13 Cab Sauv. Uh oh, the vineyard is only 40 miles from HNR, and downstream on the banks of the Columbia River...
Are you saying they light up your life?
(the marketing avenues are endless)
Re: (Score:2)
Just put a big block of concrete over it
Or a mountain.
Re: (Score:2)