For all of us who try to counter the industry propaganda we see so often in diaries here at DKos, there was an incident this week at the notorious federal reservation in Hanford, Washington involving high level nuclear waste. This from the nasty sludge left over from the Manhattan Project which was badly stored in the first place, during an evolution to transfer it to "safer" containment. Because it was leaking.
50 to 100 gallons of this highly radioactive "crunchy peanut butter" sludge got sent into a clean water line by a dumb decision on how to unclog pumps that simply weren't designed to pump chunky peanut butter. Duh. The clean water line sprung a leak, but none of those involved can figure out where that leak might be.
From The Oregonian - Hanford spill traced to vulnerable water line:
Attempts to unclog a pump plugged by nuclear waste as thick as chunky peanut butter inadvertently forced the sludge from an aging underground tank into the water line, which sprung a leak, spilling 50 to 100 gallons onto the ground, said Delmar Noyes of the U.S. Department of Energy.
"This water line was never designed to contain or have waste injected into it," he said during a telephone conference call with reporters.
As if reversing the pumps weren't dumb enough, consider the nasty crap they were trying to deal with in the first place...
It was the worst spill at Hanford in recent years as federal workers and hired contractors try to empty 149 deteriorating underground tanks filled with waste from the dawn of the nuclear age. Nearly half are suspected of leaking.
Only seven tanks have been emptied.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. The crap was escaping anyway - half of 149 tanks were 'suspected' of leaking, which is more than 74 of them, so obviously something had to be done. Right?
In this particular evolution workers happened to discover the leak when stationary monitors just happened to detect "high levels of radiation in the area," Noyes said. So they sprayed sealant on the open water to keep more highly radioactive contamination from escaping, then claiming the standard "no danger to the general public" that is (if you know anything about standard operating procedure at nukes) a red flag that crap got out.
From the Tri-City Herald, Hanford spill caused by waste backup:
"The material in this tank is some of the most difficult we've had to deal with in retrieval at Hanford," he said. "It flows but it doesn't flow very quickly. It's particularly rough on pumps."
The waste contains phosphates, which when heated and cooled turn into a gel that can gum up retrieval equipment.
The pump over tank S-102 broke down this spring and a new pump was installed July 12. The new pump is designed differently than others that have been used, in that it has a more open mouth that isn't masked by a steel cage to filter waste through.
Oh. So what happened?
It is believed that as the pump was running backward, waste got pushed up into the water line, in effect a single-shell hose that delivers water into the pump cavity. The line, connected at the bottom of the pump, never was designed to handle such waste, said Delmar Noyes, assistant tank farms manager for DOE's Office of River Protection.
He said there was no mechanism to prevent waste from being forced up the water line and that the possibility hadn't been considered.
"That was not an anticipated event," he said. "That's part of what we are investigating."
The precise location of the leak in the water line has not been found.
Well, THAT should make everybody feel much better!
We know Hanford's a shit-hole of nuclear proportions, and that it's been on the EPA Superfund list ever since the list was begun. That's why the EPA has on-site supervisors. And those of us who have ever been in the bowels of any nuclear facility's dirtiest cesspools also know that extremely dumb things are often invented on the spot to try and work around problems nobody ever thought of when writing glowing propaganda pieces on the safe, clean, too-cheap-to-meter promise of Atoms for Peace.
Hanford was the federal repository for high level waste, and offers a good overview of just how nasty the problems really are. This particular waste is as old as the original development of nuclear weapons and reactors, the very stuff the nukes now hope will be "safely" isolated for 10,000 years in Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Someday, maybe, we can leave that to our grandchildren to figure out, let's build MORE nukes now!!!
I am agin' it. Have been ever since actually serving in both government and civilian applications in a monitoring/protection capacity. While there are many significant issues with corporate greed and management laxity that serve to make nuclear power a very poor choice for our future energy planning, it's the cavalier attitude about nuclear waste - as well as our complete inability to keep it contained safely for any really pertinent length of time - that should cause us to abandon the nuclear pipe dream.
Thus I offer this significant release at Hanford last week - which is WORSE than the reported leak at Japan's K-K reactor complex after the recent 6.8 earthquake - to again make my point. Thanks for reading this far, and don't forget that the Senate version of the new Energy Bill contains $100 billion in subsidies for nukes (up for vote today) that would be much better spent on developing alternative sources of energy for our future.