For those in CO, you might not remember the similar Rocky Flats fiasco.
The court cases had such funny stuff as overturning a jury verdict on appeals as "the judges wrote that under the law, the presence of plutonium on properties south of the Jefferson County plant, which closed in 1989 for safety and environmental reasons, at best shows only a risk — not actual damages to their health or properties."
These days, the site hasn't been tested in over a decade, in an area known for top soil erosion. And now more and more houses are being built immediately adjacent, with no warning to the homebuyers that this used to be a nuclear waste superfund site.
On the 'plus side' they at one point tried to get rid of the plutonium waste by combining it into a slurry and injecting it into the ground, which left us with some of the first data on how hydraulic fracturing can cause an increase in earthquakes.
This happened quite a while ago, but similar things are still going on today. Recently, I was considering a job in Pennsylvania, which unfortunately was several miles from the Marcus Hook Sunoco refinery (which has been in operation since 1902). It was recently fined $750,000 for "illegal modifications to equipment that allowed tons of potentially hazardous gases to be released into the air over two years." ...
"According to DNREC, the flare was modified at some point to receive gases from multiple sources throughout the Marcus Hook side of the facility, although no permit for those changes was ever sought by the company."
Those gases included hydrogen fluoride among other things.
And now they've buried this information and are building thousands of homes there. Literally thousands of families live on radioactive ground. I know because we almost bought one. https://candelasglows.com
The scale of the craziness at Hanford in the 50s-60s is difficult to appreciate, or even to imagine. Many of us have taken a lab course in qualitative inorganic analysis. You know, where you dissolve a sample in nitric acid, precipitate with sulfate, filter, redissolve the precipitate, precipitate with sulfide, filter, and so on. Eventually you understand what metals the sample contained.
OK, so back in the 50s-6s, that's how they isolated plutonium from neutron-exposed uranium. After aging in water for a few weeks, levels of short-lived fission products were low enough that humans could manipulate the stuff, behind several feet of steel, lead and concrete shielding, without immediately lethal radiation doses.
But then, what they did was dissolve this shit in hot nitric acid, in huge steel vessels. With clever mechanical manipulators. Even after aging, however, levels of xenon-133 and iodine-131 were still quite high. And where do you think they went? Up a stack, of course. What else? Abbeit through shielded pipes, to protect workers.
But you know, they could only dissolve when the wind was blowing fast enough. Because otherwise, the cloud of xenon-133 and iodine-131 overhead would inflict dangerous radiation exposures to workers. They released a lot:[0]
> The formally classified report Dissolving of Twenty Day Metal at Hanford states that Hanford officials initially planned to release approximately 4,000 curies of iodine-131 and 7,900 curies of xenon-133 but ended up releasing in actuality 7,780 curies of iodine-131, along with 20,000 curies of xenon-133 into the surrounding area's atmosphere within a seven-hour period. [1] In comparison, the March 1979 Three Mile Island accident released between 15 and 24 curies of radioactive iodine.
But hey, at least they didn't dissolve on days when the wind was blowing west toward Portland or Seattle. Mainly they nuked local subsistence farmers. Iodine-131 has a half-life of just eight days. That's short enough that levels in commercial milk are low enough, given all the delays from feed to cows to stores. But if you lived near Hanford then, and your kids were drinking milk from your own cows or goats, they got dangerous iodine-131 doses to their thyroids.
low enough that humans could manipulate the stuff, behind several feet of steel, lead and concrete shielding, without immediately lethal radiation doses.
Wait, for real? I have zero training in handling fissile material, but I didn't think any significant level of radiation could make it through that much shielding.
Before people start criticizing nuclear power. This story is about the Hanford Site. This is where they exclusively made plutonium for bombs, starting from the Manhatten Project. It’s a very complex situation with waste all over the site for a number of reasons, some of them really bad (aka management incompetence, government outsourcing of responsibility, etc), some of them sort of understandable (hey Joe, it’s 1945, we don’t know much about this shit but it can’t possibly hurt anyone if we bury over there in this vast wasteland. Don’t worry we’ll remember where it is... doesn’t).
Tours of the Hanford site are available to US citizens. Highly recommend people also go to the Manahatten Project “B Reactor” out there which is available to everyone.
My primary concern with nuclear power is the human element. For which we have a long and well-demonstrated history of limitations that don't match corresponding requirements.
In other words, we are creating something human history -- as well as contemporary events -- demonstrate we do not have an enduring ability to manage.
As they say, we can't put the genie back in the bottle. But we can perhaps do something to limit scope, particularly where alternatives are developing that are safer and, sliding down the development cost graph, more cost-effective.
P.S. I'll add that, until we can manufacture elements (more fully), I prefer to keep these limited resource available for potential future use, when we have acceptable alternatives -- for me, now, meaning solar, wind, hydro (all forms of solar energy, essentially).
Who knows what need we might have of them, in the future? What if really going to space requires them in significant quantity, but we burned them all up on street lighting and casinos? ;-)
(Wouldn't it be ironic if further sources were in space, but we didn't have enough to get there?)
>Before people start criticizing nuclear power. This story is about the Hanford Site.
Anything that went wrong with the Hanford Site can go wrong with any nuclear power factory.
It's the profit and human error factors...
Not sure how many techno-naive pro nuclear factory people know that in the real world (as opposed to the fantasy world where technology is all that matters), nuclear waste is giving to MAFIA owned companies to dispose, which then save money by just dumping it in the ocean...
Great, I live a mile or two roughly downwind from a site at Los Alamos where the DOE is removing the nuclear and toxic waste dump used for weapons and research waste here for 30-40 years. I’ve felt somewhat assured that they have the nuclear and toxic material secured, but realistically there’s no reason to believe they are doing a competent job.
There is a little Safecast[1] data from the area, which does show slightly higher levels, but nothing too crazy. You could add your own readings[2] to improve that (which has been on my list, downwind from Hanford).
„Congressional staff say the contamination is not surprising because the Energy Department offers bonuses to contractors if they meet tight schedules. But there are no bonuses for preventing worker contamination or preventing releases to the environment, they say.“
"Seven employee automobiles were contaminated at the plant site, according to a Jan. 9 letter from the state Department of Ecology to Doug Shoop, the federal site chief at Hanford. When one worker demanded that his contaminated car be purchased because vent ducts were potentially still contaminated, Energy Department contractors nixed it and offered him a coupon for a free detailing from a car wash, according to collective bargaining grievance records cited by union officials. The account was confirmed by two other employees."
Welcome to the world of contracting for the federal government.
> The mess has dealt the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons environmental management program yet another setback, following more than a decade of engineering miscalculations across the nation.
I get how some insignificant/"checklist checking" agencies can cause governments to fumble, or worse markets with complex fast changing circumstances resulting in revolving doors of hiring within industry or uselessly slow reaction timeframes....that's almost old news at this point, a reality we've seemed to have accepted.
But when agencies with such critical mandates as this are also so dysfunctional then it makes it hard not to cynical about the wider system from which these "solutions" continually spring from, or maybe it's just the fundamental constraints from which they operate (such as the type of people who typically staff these agencies).
Keep in mind that this governmental function, producing nuclear weapons, was started during WWII, when it had to be done now and it didn't really matter if anyone got hurt because the alternative was getting shot in France or on some Pacific island. After that, it was buried in incredible secrecy and has never had to produce visible results. In that sort of environment, dysfunction breeds unchecked.
For many years you could walk around Paducah KY with a blacklight at night, and see the fluorescence of hex dust that had blown over from the gaseous diffusion plant. Safety has been a rather inconsistent priority in this industry.
Not that surprising given the current leadership and budgetary direction at the Department of Energy. Micheal Lewis ran a great piece [0] on the Nuclear facility safeguards about a year ago, and it appears it is quite prophetic...
One of the main companies involved, CH2M, has been ignoring worker radiation safety for years despite massive amounts of DOE funding. I think that endemic corruption and politicized contract awards are the major issues here.
The area around has been thoroughly contaminated over the 70 years. An example of a disaster there - a lake that the nasty stuff had been dumped into gets dry somewhat with wind blowing away that dust from the opened lakebed.
The promise of nuclear power in the 60s and 70s was "we don't know yet how to manage the waste, but in a few decades we'll have it sorted out". We didn't. Nobody knows how to safely decommission old nuclear facilities, how to manage nuclear waste for thousands of years.
This was a weapons site; the rules for weapons sites were dramatically laxer than for energy sites. You don't see this sort of problem at energy sites, generally.
We know how, it’s just that nobody wants to pay for it or have it stored in their state. This is a failure of politics, not technology. Ironically the result is that of course we still store the stuff, but it’s on-site in pools all over the country, which is much less secure than known alternatives. Because no one is willing to spend political capital to centralize and modernize storage in their backyard, it’s in everyone’s backyard.
[+] [-] monocasa|8 years ago|reply
The court cases had such funny stuff as overturning a jury verdict on appeals as "the judges wrote that under the law, the presence of plutonium on properties south of the Jefferson County plant, which closed in 1989 for safety and environmental reasons, at best shows only a risk — not actual damages to their health or properties."
https://www.denverpost.com/2010/09/03/appeals-court-tosses-j...
These days, the site hasn't been tested in over a decade, in an area known for top soil erosion. And now more and more houses are being built immediately adjacent, with no warning to the homebuyers that this used to be a nuclear waste superfund site.
On the 'plus side' they at one point tried to get rid of the plutonium waste by combining it into a slurry and injecting it into the ground, which left us with some of the first data on how hydraulic fracturing can cause an increase in earthquakes.
[+] [-] clumsysmurf|8 years ago|reply
https://www.amazon.com/Full-Body-Burden-Growing-Nuclear-eboo...
An interview with the author was in the Atlantic a few years ago:
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/09/a-septe...
This happened quite a while ago, but similar things are still going on today. Recently, I was considering a job in Pennsylvania, which unfortunately was several miles from the Marcus Hook Sunoco refinery (which has been in operation since 1902). It was recently fined $750,000 for "illegal modifications to equipment that allowed tons of potentially hazardous gases to be released into the air over two years." ...
"According to DNREC, the flare was modified at some point to receive gases from multiple sources throughout the Marcus Hook side of the facility, although no permit for those changes was ever sought by the company."
Those gases included hydrogen fluoride among other things.
https://www.delawareonline.com/story/money/business/2018/03/...
[+] [-] iancmceachern|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirimir|8 years ago|reply
OK, so back in the 50s-6s, that's how they isolated plutonium from neutron-exposed uranium. After aging in water for a few weeks, levels of short-lived fission products were low enough that humans could manipulate the stuff, behind several feet of steel, lead and concrete shielding, without immediately lethal radiation doses.
But then, what they did was dissolve this shit in hot nitric acid, in huge steel vessels. With clever mechanical manipulators. Even after aging, however, levels of xenon-133 and iodine-131 were still quite high. And where do you think they went? Up a stack, of course. What else? Abbeit through shielded pipes, to protect workers.
But you know, they could only dissolve when the wind was blowing fast enough. Because otherwise, the cloud of xenon-133 and iodine-131 overhead would inflict dangerous radiation exposures to workers. They released a lot:[0]
> The formally classified report Dissolving of Twenty Day Metal at Hanford states that Hanford officials initially planned to release approximately 4,000 curies of iodine-131 and 7,900 curies of xenon-133 but ended up releasing in actuality 7,780 curies of iodine-131, along with 20,000 curies of xenon-133 into the surrounding area's atmosphere within a seven-hour period. [1] In comparison, the March 1979 Three Mile Island accident released between 15 and 24 curies of radioactive iodine.
But hey, at least they didn't dissolve on days when the wind was blowing west toward Portland or Seattle. Mainly they nuked local subsistence farmers. Iodine-131 has a half-life of just eight days. That's short enough that levels in commercial milk are low enough, given all the delays from feed to cows to stores. But if you lived near Hanford then, and your kids were drinking milk from your own cows or goats, they got dangerous iodine-131 doses to their thyroids.
0) http://www.hanfordproject.com/greenrun.html
[+] [-] gascan|8 years ago|reply
Wait, for real? I have zero training in handling fissile material, but I didn't think any significant level of radiation could make it through that much shielding.
[+] [-] erentz|8 years ago|reply
Tours of the Hanford site are available to US citizens. Highly recommend people also go to the Manahatten Project “B Reactor” out there which is available to everyone.
[+] [-] pasbesoin|8 years ago|reply
In other words, we are creating something human history -- as well as contemporary events -- demonstrate we do not have an enduring ability to manage.
As they say, we can't put the genie back in the bottle. But we can perhaps do something to limit scope, particularly where alternatives are developing that are safer and, sliding down the development cost graph, more cost-effective.
P.S. I'll add that, until we can manufacture elements (more fully), I prefer to keep these limited resource available for potential future use, when we have acceptable alternatives -- for me, now, meaning solar, wind, hydro (all forms of solar energy, essentially).
Who knows what need we might have of them, in the future? What if really going to space requires them in significant quantity, but we burned them all up on street lighting and casinos? ;-)
(Wouldn't it be ironic if further sources were in space, but we didn't have enough to get there?)
[+] [-] coldtea|8 years ago|reply
Anything that went wrong with the Hanford Site can go wrong with any nuclear power factory.
It's the profit and human error factors...
Not sure how many techno-naive pro nuclear factory people know that in the real world (as opposed to the fantasy world where technology is all that matters), nuclear waste is giving to MAFIA owned companies to dispose, which then save money by just dumping it in the ocean...
Not joking:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_waste_dumping_by_the_%27...
https://gizmodo.com/the-mob-is-secretly-dumping-nuclear-wast...
and that's the tip of the iceberg... Even worse in the developing world...
[+] [-] nasredin|8 years ago|reply
Quick look at their website says it's not available to the general public. Only government officials, students, etc.
[+] [-] specialist|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] code_duck|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blacksmith_tb|8 years ago|reply
1: http://safecast.org/tilemap/?y=35.665&x=-106.501&z=10&l=0&m=...
2: https://github.com/Safecast/General/wiki/Safecast-Devices
[+] [-] MrBuddyCasino|8 years ago|reply
So that’s how it works, huh?
[+] [-] mcguire|8 years ago|reply
Welcome to the world of contracting for the federal government.
[+] [-] dmix|8 years ago|reply
I get how some insignificant/"checklist checking" agencies can cause governments to fumble, or worse markets with complex fast changing circumstances resulting in revolving doors of hiring within industry or uselessly slow reaction timeframes....that's almost old news at this point, a reality we've seemed to have accepted.
But when agencies with such critical mandates as this are also so dysfunctional then it makes it hard not to cynical about the wider system from which these "solutions" continually spring from, or maybe it's just the fundamental constraints from which they operate (such as the type of people who typically staff these agencies).
[+] [-] mcguire|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jessaustin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shaqbert|8 years ago|reply
[0]: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/department-of-energy...
[+] [-] hackerman12345|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bezosisevil|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trhway|8 years ago|reply
The area around has been thoroughly contaminated over the 70 years. An example of a disaster there - a lake that the nasty stuff had been dumped into gets dry somewhat with wind blowing away that dust from the opened lakebed.
[+] [-] wazoox|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsynnott|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cfadvan|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monocasa|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StreamBright|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheForumTroll|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waiseristy|8 years ago|reply