I'm submitting this based on the current top item "North Dakota law lists fake critical minerals based on coal lawyers' names" [0].
This accident was traced to a manager transcribing "inorganic absorbent" as "an organic absorbent". A more serious example of the need to have competent people with domain knowledge in the room and empowered when documents are written.
Not just when documents are written, but also when the practices they describe are implemented.
You don't need to know a lot of chemistry to realize that mixing organics with nitric acid is a bad idea. Why did none of the technicians doing the work say "hold on, this doesn't seem right"?
I'm surprised they made critical material purchasing decisions based on what some guy thinks he heard in a meeting, rather than official written documents written by and cross-checked by multiple engineers.
Thanks for highlighting that, I missed that in the video and was wondering why "anorganic" should be something different than "inorganic" (in my native German it's "anorganisch").
But still, I'm a bit alarmed that a trained nuclear technician would simply follow these instructions and mix organic material with acid without having any second thoughts about it...
I did a sort of internship at Los Alamos which involved building some drones. A year or two later I got a call from my advisor there, out of the blue asking me if I had anything immediately available that could do recon underground effectively. I didn't really, so I declined. I asked what they needed it for and he said it would be easier if I got the info from the news. That was kinda terrifying ... turned out to be this incident.
I went to school in New Mexico and had really mixed feelings about the culture around Los Alamos and Sandia.
There are a lot of brilliant people there both in terms of science and project management. However, the best person I knew got driven out. But I think also a lot of nepotism and a security clearance culture that filters out really interesting people and leaves behind the dangerously milquetoast.
>In July 2012, LANS issued Solution Package (SP) Report-72, Salt Waste (SP #72) (Revision 1)
to address the processing steps for nitrate salt drums. This document concluded that the
glovebox procedure must be revised or replaced to ensure that the final waste mixture meets or
exceeds 1.2:1 kitty litter/zeolite:nitrate salt as specified by May 8, 2012, LANL-CO white paper.
>In response to SP #72, LANS prepared a major revision to the glovebox operations procedure.
Section 10.6 was added to provide instructions for nitrate salt drum processing. Paragraph
10.6[3] stated “ensure an organic absorbent (Kitty Litter/Zeolite® absorbent) is added to the
waste material at a minimum of 1.5 absorbent to 1 part waste ratio.” The Board concluded that
specifying the use of “organic” absorbent and the omission of the word “clay” in the WCRRF
glovebox procedure was not consistent with the direction provided in the white paper.
I remember at the time there was also some concern that the swap had taken place due to a green initiative to use renewable sources rather than something that was mined. there were no sources to back that up except the fact that the organic litter is a little over double the cost of clay litter.
It was not sufficient to just write "inorganic". Given the seriousness of possible consequences, some redundancy should have been added. E.g. "inorganic mineral-based kitty litter can be used; organic kitty litter is not acceptable". A few more words would have prevented an actual nuclear incident.
In May 2012, Los Alamos published a white paper titled “Amount of Zeolite Required to Meet the Constraints Established by the EMRTC Report RF 10-13: Application of LANL Evaporator Nitrate Salts.” In other words, “How much kitty litter should be added to radioactive waste?” The answer was about 1.2 to 1, inorganic zeolite clay to nitrate salt waste, by volume.
That guidance was then translated into the actual procedures that technicians would use to repackage the waste in gloveboxes at Los Alamos. But something got lost in translation. As far as investigators could determine, here’s what happened: In a meeting in May 2012, the manager responsible for glovebox operations took personal notes about this switch in materials. Those notes were sent in an email and eventually incorporated into the written procedures:
“Ensure an organic absorbent is added to the waste material at a minimum of 1.5 absorbent to 1 part waste ratio.”
“It’s almost unbelievable that we entrust ourselves - squishy, sometimes hapless bags of water, meat, and bones - to navigate protocols of such profound complexity needed to safely take advantage of radioactive materials.”
Maybe it’s just me but I feel like that all the time, not specifically about radioactive stuff, but about other highly complex and regulated environments where a simple mistake can have catastrophic consequences. As an example, just look at how the aerospace industry operates, there are so many talented scientists and engineers working in every aspect and yet many incidents take place every year due to trivial human errors, from pilots misunderstanding something to technicians not tightening a bolt enough.
Of course it’s not like we can trust anything (anyone?) else other than other humans to do this stuff, but it blows my mind how easily we forget about it.
If you map out everything you have to do in a single day, and then work out all the things that you have to avoid for it to not go wrong, it's kind of terrifying.
Robot designers and toddler-minders will know some of these.
We're so used to so many failsafes that the "bare minimum to operate" for many things is frighteningly simple (very early electric wiring, for example).
I tried to commit documentation to our source repository; I was told to upload it to the documentation site instead.
The documentation site that we've used for one year, subsequent to the previous documentation site the we used for 3 years, subsequent to the previous documentation site that we used for 5 years.
Following the trend, by the end of this year we will migrate documentation every 5 minutes, degrading every time.
At least source code can be migrated with fidelity. (The main branch anyway)
I have a strong preference for checking in docs with the source code but I'm a software dev.
We have a data team where I work that has a huge Confluence Wiki that helps them maintained shared reality about procedures and standards. I never log into it, if I need to know something from their point of view I go next door and ask one of them.
This may be hijacking the thread,
but I had an interesting experience lately.
Bear with me,
Los Alamos National Laboratory is part of the story.
I'm a film photographer,
and I had been taking my color film to a lab to be processed and scanned.
A couple of months ago the lab let me know that the turnaround time for scanning would be a couple of weeks instead of a few days.
Some two months later,
I still had not gotten my film back.
I went to the lab and spoke with the owner,
and he said that LANL was sending him so much film to develop and scan that he couldn't get to his other customers,
and he expected that the volume would increase.
He was nice enough to give me my undeveloped film and and refund the prepaid bill.
I did not ask,
as I didn't want to piss of the owner,
but I have many questions.
Why is LANL sending so much film to a lab for developing?
Why can't LANL set up their own film developing and scanning lab,
it's not nuclear engineering,
it just requires some equipment and a little expertise.
Why now?
Why are the even using film these days?
Why did the lab's owner feel it necessary to prioritize LANL's business over others,
rather than putting it in the queue to wait its turn?
>Why can't LANL set up their own film developing and scanning lab
Are you asking why a government agency can't just magic up random money and employees during a time the parent government is saying privatization and getting rid of government employees is the way to go?
"Hot" nuclear waste means theres still a lot of energy left to capture. Why are we disposing of materials that still have a lot of energy to capture? Seems like the closer we get to lead, in terms of capture, the better.
It would be like taking my half-full of gas car to the pump, dumping the existing gas, and getting fresh. Its a waste of energy, waste of resources, and generates worse nuclear waste.
The materials are still full of potential energy, but it's much more expensive to reprocess them than to mine fresh uranium. It's even more expensive to reprocess them without incidentally releasing more radioactive contamination into the environment. (Several countries reprocess nuclear fuel now or did so in the past, but the facilities have always released more radioactive material into the environment than simple storage.)
It's kind of like why old and broken polyvinyl chloride pipes go to landfills instead of being burned as fuel in power plants. Even though PVC is flammable, the cost of burning PVC and capturing its carcinogenic combustion byproducts is a lot greater than burying waste PVC and burning fossil hydrocarbons.
In the far future, uranium mining costs might rise enough that it makes economic sense to reprocess old spent nuclear fuel. In the early days of the atomic age people thought that reprocessing and breeder reactors would be necessary because uranium was believed to be very rare on Earth. Vigorous exploration programs and new mining techniques proved this belief to be false by the end of the 1960s, and the situation hasn't changed since then. It's safer and cheaper to mine fresh fuel and just store the old fuel without any sort of reprocessing.
See e.g.
Bunn, Matthew G., Steve Fetter, John P. Holdren, and Bob van der Zwaan. 2003. The Economics of Reprocessing vs. Direct Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel (PDF):
There’s a lot of nuance to the answer and I’m not a nuclear engineer, just an EE and occasional nuclear enthusiast. The biggest issue is the cost-effectiveness of reprocessing the “waste”, which you are completely correct about still having a ton of residual energy available, back into a useable fuel for a sustained nuclear chain reaction.
Some of the fission products that are produced in reactors are actively harmful for sustaining a chain reaction (neutron poisons), Xenon-135 being a prime example. Xenon-135 only has a half-life of about 9 hours (which means it’s pretty spicy) but it also has a massive neutron capture cross-section. If it doesn’t capture a neutron, it emits a beta particle (electron/positron), which doesn’t contribute to sustaining the reaction; if it does capture a neutron it becomes Xenon-136 which is pretty stable. In both cases, it’s sitting in the fuel but either useless (yay) or actively hurting the neutron economy (boo).
At some point in the future it might be economically advantageous to reprocess “used once” nuclear waste and use it in a second cycle but for now it’s way cheaper to get more fresh uranium and process that into fuel instead.
They just don't produce that much power. We're talking about hundreds of watts per barrel. You can get more energy by putting a water barrel on your roof.
And in this case, the reaction had nothing to do with nuclear energy. It was a regular chemical reaction, that got into thermal runaway.
That's not what "hot" means in this context. "Hot" means "highly radioactive", i.e. high number of decay events per second, high concentration of short half-life isotopes, high power/volume resulting from radioactive decay.
Nuclear reactors do not work off radioactive decay. U-235, for example has a half life of 704 million years. Radioisotope thermal electric generators [0] by contrast do run off radioactive decay, an isotopes used for that application have short half-lives, such as Pu-238 with 87.7 years.
Commercial nuclear reactors use unenriched or minimally enriched fuel. This means that, within a fairly short period of time, the percentage of fissile material in the fuel drops to the point where continuing to use it is no longer economical. At that point the fuel is a mixture of extremely hot fission products, transuranics, unreacted fuel, and non-fissile (but fertile) isotopes such as U-238.
It's not practical to use the decay energy from the fission products for power. What would make much more sense would be to remove the fission products and recycle the fuel that remains into new fuel (for a reactor that's designed to use it). This would be a much more efficient use of mined nuclear fuel (allowing nuclear power to be used for thousands of years), it would vastly reduce the volume of nuclear waste, and it would mean nuclear waste would only be hazardous for decades to centuries.
The US was on the path to this with the Integral Fast Reactor and Pyroprocessing [1] developed by the Argonne National Laboratory. This was killed [2] in 1994 by the Clinton administration. Not for any technical reason, but because it was a "threat to nuclear non-proliferation". How that makes sense when, to the best of my knowledge the process developed by Argonne couldn't be used to produce weapons-grade material, and even if it could the US already had nuclear weapons so it wouldn't be proliferating it to a non-nuclear country, I don't know. But, apparently, since some other forms of nuclear waste reprocessing can be used to generate weapons-grade material (by extracting Pu-239), it was a bad symbol so it had to go.
> It’s almost unbelievable that we entrust ourselves - squishy, sometimes hapless bags of water, meat, and bones - to navigate protocols of such profound complexity needed to safely take advantage of radioactive materials.
This type of thought rings more and more true to me as I grow older.
Did you read the article at all? No, it was an actual catastrophe. There was damage, years of disruption for the work going on down there, a close call for the people working down there, years of cleanup running half a billion dollars.
tape_measure|1 month ago
This accident was traced to a manager transcribing "inorganic absorbent" as "an organic absorbent". A more serious example of the need to have competent people with domain knowledge in the room and empowered when documents are written.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46492161
cperciva|1 month ago
You don't need to know a lot of chemistry to realize that mixing organics with nitric acid is a bad idea. Why did none of the technicians doing the work say "hold on, this doesn't seem right"?
daymanstep|1 month ago
rob74|1 month ago
But still, I'm a bit alarmed that a trained nuclear technician would simply follow these instructions and mix organic material with acid without having any second thoughts about it...
formerly_proven|1 month ago
dredmorbius|1 month ago
A literal, or literary, bit-flip.
foobarbecue|1 month ago
Internship started as this thing: https://youtu.be/hq03MsP1MPI?si=lVpDMLqRN4nfwMiA really great experience.
PaulHoule|1 month ago
There are a lot of brilliant people there both in terms of science and project management. However, the best person I knew got driven out. But I think also a lot of nepotism and a security clearance culture that filters out really interesting people and leaves behind the dangerously milquetoast.
hinkley|1 month ago
janez2|1 month ago
themaninthedark|1 month ago
>In July 2012, LANS issued Solution Package (SP) Report-72, Salt Waste (SP #72) (Revision 1) to address the processing steps for nitrate salt drums. This document concluded that the glovebox procedure must be revised or replaced to ensure that the final waste mixture meets or exceeds 1.2:1 kitty litter/zeolite:nitrate salt as specified by May 8, 2012, LANL-CO white paper.
>In response to SP #72, LANS prepared a major revision to the glovebox operations procedure. Section 10.6 was added to provide instructions for nitrate salt drum processing. Paragraph 10.6[3] stated “ensure an organic absorbent (Kitty Litter/Zeolite® absorbent) is added to the waste material at a minimum of 1.5 absorbent to 1 part waste ratio.” The Board concluded that specifying the use of “organic” absorbent and the omission of the word “clay” in the WCRRF glovebox procedure was not consistent with the direction provided in the white paper.
https://wipp.energy.gov/Special/AIB_WIPP%20Rad_Event%20Repor...
I remember at the time there was also some concern that the swap had taken place due to a green initiative to use renewable sources rather than something that was mined. there were no sources to back that up except the fact that the organic litter is a little over double the cost of clay litter.
nine_k|1 month ago
It was not sufficient to just write "inorganic". Given the seriousness of possible consequences, some redundancy should have been added. E.g. "inorganic mineral-based kitty litter can be used; organic kitty litter is not acceptable". A few more words would have prevented an actual nuclear incident.
ortusdux|1 month ago
In May 2012, Los Alamos published a white paper titled “Amount of Zeolite Required to Meet the Constraints Established by the EMRTC Report RF 10-13: Application of LANL Evaporator Nitrate Salts.” In other words, “How much kitty litter should be added to radioactive waste?” The answer was about 1.2 to 1, inorganic zeolite clay to nitrate salt waste, by volume.
That guidance was then translated into the actual procedures that technicians would use to repackage the waste in gloveboxes at Los Alamos. But something got lost in translation. As far as investigators could determine, here’s what happened: In a meeting in May 2012, the manager responsible for glovebox operations took personal notes about this switch in materials. Those notes were sent in an email and eventually incorporated into the written procedures:
“Ensure an organic absorbent is added to the waste material at a minimum of 1.5 absorbent to 1 part waste ratio.”
fsckboy|1 month ago
rmonvfer|1 month ago
“It’s almost unbelievable that we entrust ourselves - squishy, sometimes hapless bags of water, meat, and bones - to navigate protocols of such profound complexity needed to safely take advantage of radioactive materials.”
Maybe it’s just me but I feel like that all the time, not specifically about radioactive stuff, but about other highly complex and regulated environments where a simple mistake can have catastrophic consequences. As an example, just look at how the aerospace industry operates, there are so many talented scientists and engineers working in every aspect and yet many incidents take place every year due to trivial human errors, from pilots misunderstanding something to technicians not tightening a bolt enough.
Of course it’s not like we can trust anything (anyone?) else other than other humans to do this stuff, but it blows my mind how easily we forget about it.
bombcar|1 month ago
Robot designers and toddler-minders will know some of these.
We're so used to so many failsafes that the "bare minimum to operate" for many things is frighteningly simple (very early electric wiring, for example).
mikestorrent|1 month ago
If there weren't so many of us, it would be a lot harder to accept the losses.
elzbardico|1 month ago
As an owner of a particularly opinionated Orange Cat, I can relate.
square_usual|1 month ago
cozzyd|1 month ago
csours|1 month ago
Well, I knew what I meant.
I tried to commit documentation to our source repository; I was told to upload it to the documentation site instead.
The documentation site that we've used for one year, subsequent to the previous documentation site the we used for 3 years, subsequent to the previous documentation site that we used for 5 years.
Following the trend, by the end of this year we will migrate documentation every 5 minutes, degrading every time.
At least source code can be migrated with fidelity. (The main branch anyway)
Who me? Bitter and scarred not at all!
PaulHoule|1 month ago
We have a data team where I work that has a huge Confluence Wiki that helps them maintained shared reality about procedures and standards. I never log into it, if I need to know something from their point of view I go next door and ask one of them.
cratermoon|1 month ago
I'm a film photographer, and I had been taking my color film to a lab to be processed and scanned. A couple of months ago the lab let me know that the turnaround time for scanning would be a couple of weeks instead of a few days. Some two months later, I still had not gotten my film back. I went to the lab and spoke with the owner, and he said that LANL was sending him so much film to develop and scan that he couldn't get to his other customers, and he expected that the volume would increase. He was nice enough to give me my undeveloped film and and refund the prepaid bill.
I did not ask, as I didn't want to piss of the owner, but I have many questions. Why is LANL sending so much film to a lab for developing? Why can't LANL set up their own film developing and scanning lab, it's not nuclear engineering, it just requires some equipment and a little expertise. Why now? Why are the even using film these days? Why did the lab's owner feel it necessary to prioritize LANL's business over others, rather than putting it in the queue to wait its turn?
pixl97|1 month ago
Are you asking why a government agency can't just magic up random money and employees during a time the parent government is saying privatization and getting rid of government employees is the way to go?
thomasjudge|1 month ago
pfdietz|1 month ago
They have the disadvantage that they don't control odor well, and when composted smell even worse. So don't try to compost them at home.
nick49488171|1 month ago
elzbardico|1 month ago
MBCook|1 month ago
mystraline|1 month ago
"Hot" nuclear waste means theres still a lot of energy left to capture. Why are we disposing of materials that still have a lot of energy to capture? Seems like the closer we get to lead, in terms of capture, the better.
It would be like taking my half-full of gas car to the pump, dumping the existing gas, and getting fresh. Its a waste of energy, waste of resources, and generates worse nuclear waste.
philipkglass|1 month ago
It's kind of like why old and broken polyvinyl chloride pipes go to landfills instead of being burned as fuel in power plants. Even though PVC is flammable, the cost of burning PVC and capturing its carcinogenic combustion byproducts is a lot greater than burying waste PVC and burning fossil hydrocarbons.
In the far future, uranium mining costs might rise enough that it makes economic sense to reprocess old spent nuclear fuel. In the early days of the atomic age people thought that reprocessing and breeder reactors would be necessary because uranium was believed to be very rare on Earth. Vigorous exploration programs and new mining techniques proved this belief to be false by the end of the 1960s, and the situation hasn't changed since then. It's safer and cheaper to mine fresh fuel and just store the old fuel without any sort of reprocessing.
See e.g.
Bunn, Matthew G., Steve Fetter, John P. Holdren, and Bob van der Zwaan. 2003. The Economics of Reprocessing vs. Direct Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel (PDF):
https://dash.harvard.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/7312037d...
tonyarkles|1 month ago
Some of the fission products that are produced in reactors are actively harmful for sustaining a chain reaction (neutron poisons), Xenon-135 being a prime example. Xenon-135 only has a half-life of about 9 hours (which means it’s pretty spicy) but it also has a massive neutron capture cross-section. If it doesn’t capture a neutron, it emits a beta particle (electron/positron), which doesn’t contribute to sustaining the reaction; if it does capture a neutron it becomes Xenon-136 which is pretty stable. In both cases, it’s sitting in the fuel but either useless (yay) or actively hurting the neutron economy (boo).
At some point in the future it might be economically advantageous to reprocess “used once” nuclear waste and use it in a second cycle but for now it’s way cheaper to get more fresh uranium and process that into fuel instead.
cyberax|1 month ago
And in this case, the reaction had nothing to do with nuclear energy. It was a regular chemical reaction, that got into thermal runaway.
dkbrk|1 month ago
Nuclear reactors do not work off radioactive decay. U-235, for example has a half life of 704 million years. Radioisotope thermal electric generators [0] by contrast do run off radioactive decay, an isotopes used for that application have short half-lives, such as Pu-238 with 87.7 years.
Commercial nuclear reactors use unenriched or minimally enriched fuel. This means that, within a fairly short period of time, the percentage of fissile material in the fuel drops to the point where continuing to use it is no longer economical. At that point the fuel is a mixture of extremely hot fission products, transuranics, unreacted fuel, and non-fissile (but fertile) isotopes such as U-238.
It's not practical to use the decay energy from the fission products for power. What would make much more sense would be to remove the fission products and recycle the fuel that remains into new fuel (for a reactor that's designed to use it). This would be a much more efficient use of mined nuclear fuel (allowing nuclear power to be used for thousands of years), it would vastly reduce the volume of nuclear waste, and it would mean nuclear waste would only be hazardous for decades to centuries.
The US was on the path to this with the Integral Fast Reactor and Pyroprocessing [1] developed by the Argonne National Laboratory. This was killed [2] in 1994 by the Clinton administration. Not for any technical reason, but because it was a "threat to nuclear non-proliferation". How that makes sense when, to the best of my knowledge the process developed by Argonne couldn't be used to produce weapons-grade material, and even if it could the US already had nuclear weapons so it wouldn't be proliferating it to a non-nuclear country, I don't know. But, apparently, since some other forms of nuclear waste reprocessing can be used to generate weapons-grade material (by extracting Pu-239), it was a bad symbol so it had to go.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Integral_fast_rea...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Integral_fast_rea...
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
consumer451|1 month ago
This type of thought rings more and more true to me as I grow older.
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
syntaxing|1 month ago
avalys|1 month ago
1970-01-01|1 month ago
terminalbraid|1 month ago
cozzyd|1 month ago
jokoon|1 month ago
after reading a summary, this title is very click-baity
The title reads like "a cat got into a nuclear plant, got contaminated in a and spread radioactivity with cat litter stuck to its paws"