Pump leaks 'hot' water at Hanford

[IChing]

Source: The Oregonian

Saturday, July 28, 2007
PATRICK O'NEILL
The Oregonian Staff
A clogged pump caused an undetermined amount of highly radioactive waste to spill on the ground Thursday night and Friday morning during a transfer operation at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

Kim Ballinger, spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Energy at Hanford, said several workers were involved in the transfer but none was contaminated.

As a precaution, about 50 office workers -- most of them between one to two miles from the spill site -- were evacuated Friday afternoon. Environmental monitoring found the traces of radioactivity Friday morning, and about 11 a.m. the workers were told to stay inside their buildings. They were moved out of the area about 3:30 p.m.

Read more: http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/118561839279910.xml&coll=7

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Some Data:
http://visz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/woalert_read.php?cid=12595&cat=dis&lang=eng
Maps:
http://visz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/index.php?smp=&lang=eng

[NMDemDist2]

1. the Hanford site is a huge mess

we'll hear of more mishaps I'm sure as they TRY to stop the seepage into the Columbia River

[IChing]

2. Also into the water table

We see too many instances of a Homer Simpson type mistakes across the nuclear industry

[originalpckelly]

5. Oh, come on, nuclear energy is safe!

Right? Isn't it green? Or maybe that's the whole radioactive glow?

[NNadir]

8. It is in fact.

The sort of discussion taking place in this thread is rather indicative of the television driven mentality of the anti-nuclear industry.

This is not a power plant, it has never been a power plant, and it will never be a power plant.

The number of fatalities associated with this event in a weapons facility is zero.

The number of fatalities associated with dangerous fossil fuel waste (military and otherwise) is not zero.

Antinuclear ignorance is seldom capable of finding out what actually happened before jumping to wild and unsupported conclusions.

This is why we have a huge problem with dangerous fossil fuel waste - it's sometimes called "carbon dioxide" - and the vast majority of people in the antinuclear cults couldn't care less.

No form of energy is without risks. However the risks have been systematically examined many times.

The most famous case can be found in figure 9:

http://www.externe.info/expoltec.pdf

Tens of billions of tons of dangerous fossil fuel waste could be spilled and it would produce nothing like the excitement here.

How do I know?

Tens of billions of tons of dangerous fossil fuel waste are dumped without producing any such hysteria, even though in the case of the dangerous fossil fuel waste a little such hysteria would be appropriate.

[originalpckelly]

11. Handford was the site of nuclear breeder reactors for nuclear weapons for years.

And this case illustrates the lies being fed to people about the ability to keep radioactive waste under control, whether from breeder reactors or power generation reactors.

[daleo]

13. Breeder reactors are very touchy, and difficult to control

I don't think I would want to live anywhere near one.

[NNadir]

16. Your claims are actually irrelevant.

The leak here had nothing to do with breeder reactors.

I assume you would have no problem living next to a dangerous fossil fuel plant.

Am I correct?

[daleo]

17. The claims may have nothing to do with this accident

But breeder reactors are notoriously difficult to control. As for fossil fuel plants, they go by my house in a steady stream every day.

I agree that pollution and greenhouse gases are a problem, but I am not convinced that intensive building of nuclear plants are a viable solution for many reasons - dangerous waste, the potential for catastrophe, and the fairly limited supply of uranium.

[NNadir]

21. Oh. So you are claiming that carbon dioxide is not a dangerous waste, not catastrophic and does

not result the use of a depletable resource.

How interesting!

I never thought of it that way. I always thought that dangerous fossil fuel waste was a real problem, and a real catastrophe.

I'll bet you've really, really, really, really, really, really looked deep and hard into control systems for breeder reactors of all types and are an expert. No doubt you know all the cross sections of all control materials for epithermal neutrons and have deep insight to issues of thermal hydraulics.

As for the size of uranium and thorium resources, I'm sure your work refuting the use of aldoxime resins has settled the matter once and for all.

Frankly, I have the feeling you don't have any idea what you are talking about.

The application of a special criteria to nuclear that people apply to nothing else is the reason why dangerous fossil fuels are rapidly and probably irreversibly destroying the planet.

In fact, if there was a dangerous leak of napalm or napalm related products, it would have never generated a hysterical and misleading thread like this one.

How do I know?

Because, well, napalm is frequently dispersed through the biosphere without any calls to ban petroleum.

In fact, people in general couldn't care less what dangerous fossil fuels do or how they are applied or what they kill.

[daleo]

23. I am not a nuclear engineer

But my degree was in physics, so I have some familiarity with nuclear reactor concepts. It is hardly controversial to say that breeder reactors are touchy - that's inherent in their design.

Besides, the supply of uranium is not that huge, so it isn't a long term solution.

I happen to think there are better alternatives than nuclear, as far the energy situation goes. Global warming is a serious concern, but I don't believe going nuclear is an appropriate solution. We would be better off to emphasize wind, solar, and other non polluting sources and to scale back on our unnecessary consumption of energy.

[NNadir]

25. You're not a nuclear engineer?

You have a degree in physics.

How interesting.

Amory Lovins has a degree in Physics, but he is surprisingly incompetent to evaluate issues in energy, and you know, energy is one of the most important topics in physics.

He has been saying what you are saying for almost 30 years now, and in fact, the earth's atmosphere is collapsing at an accelerating rate. He couldn't care less. He keeps repeating himself.

I assume, since you have a degree in physics, that you are familiar with the concept of the exajoule but maybe not.

Since you are familiar with the concept of the exajoule, maybe you can tell me how many exajoules wind, solar and other "non-polluting" sources of energy are producing.

Never mind. I'll answer the question and save you the trouble of looking it up.

World energy demand as of 2004 was about 470 exajoules.

There are only a few exajoule scale primary energy sources in the world. I will only discuss those that are not dangerous fossil fuels that produce dangerous fossil fuel waste.

The largest single source is nuclear energy, which produces about 30 exajoules of primary energy.

The next largest single source is hydroelectricity which produces about 10 exajoules of primary energy, almost all of it in the form of pure electricity.

After that is the combined so called "pollution free" renewable resources, wind, solar, biomass, blah, blah, blah which produce all together about 1.2 exajoules of electricity, the vast majority of it from burning things like trees and garbage.

It is nice to know that in your enthusiasm for producing rote anti-nuclear mystical remarks, you are willing to bet the lives of every man, woman, child, plant and animal on sources of energy that after 30 years of uninterupted cheering produce about 1/235th of world consumption.

In fact, you are speaking against the largest - by far - form of climate change free energy there is. You apparently have no idea exactly how dangerous that is.

As for the hand waving about "conservation" I assume that you are not referring to the billions of people on this planet who live with less than 100 watts of power on average. I suppose you're talking about the 300 million Americans who use 12,000 watts of power.

If, by the way, the rest of the world lived at your standards - if you are a typical American, world energy demand would be 2500 exajoules. I'll bet though, you couldn't care less.

Let me tell you something bluntly: Repeating comfortable myths is the cause of the problem, not the solution.

By the way: Solar energy is by far the most trivial form of renewable energy which is - excepting hydro - trivial. The only reason that you are able to believe that solar energy has no external cost is that it is so small and so trivial that its environmental impact is invisible.

If you want to know what solar waste will look like - if it ever becomes a meaningful source of energy - I suggest you look at the computer industry. The chemistry of the two industries is pretty close.

The world has 3.5 - 4.0 billion tons of uranium in the oceans alone by the way, and the ocean is saturated with said uranium, meaning that there is much more where that came from. I'm sure you've put your head around that big concept, to the extent that you are not worried about the dangerous deadly horrible incredible disasterous leaky pipe at Hanford.

The uranium in the oceans, fully fissioned, represents about 300 million exajoules of energy. Then there's thorium...

[daleo]

28. You know, you don't have to insult people when you debate a subject

Just because someone doesn't agree with you, doesn't mean they are stupid or uneducated.

I have read plenty on this subject, and a lot of well informed people don't believe nuclear energy can replace the word's energy needs for anything more than a few generations. Currently only a very small proportion of the world's energy needs is being met by nuclear. Ramping that up to the levels required would increase the amount of nuclear waste by a factor of at least 100, and the probability of catastrophic accidents would rise commensurately.

Seawater contains a wide range of minerals, but extracting them is no small problem. It contains gold too, but nobody's getting rich from that. I have my doubts about whether recovering uranium from seawater will ever be cost effective. Even optimistic estimates say this would cost 5 to 10 times what mining uranium costs, if it ever gets off the ground (or out of the sea).

It wasn't long ago that wind power was considered pie in the sky, but now some countries in Europe are getting 20% of their electricity from wind. There is still plenty of scope for expansion of this resource.

Only time will tell which set of technologies will prevail.

[NNadir]

15. If you don't know what you're talking about, make stuff up.

The Hanford reactors were all with one exception - the reactor that John F. Kennedy insisted on building - not connected to the power grid.

Thus they were all irrelevant to commercial nuclear power.

They were all otherwise weapons reactors.

Neither were they "breeder" reactors.

Come back if you ever find out what the word breeder means.

[originalpckelly]

24. I said that, you're the one making stuff up. I said it isn't a power plant...

but it did have breeder reactors and it has tons of nuclear waste which you Nuke-Nazis want to try and forget about. What do we do with the waste Einstein?

Are you really stupid enough to be taken in by the GE Nuclear propaganda?

[Chomskyite]

26. I've read and taught Frederick Douglass for years

. . . but I don't think he ever used smugness as an advocacy technique.

[mbperrin]

31. There are reactors there, right? And so how would the

waste from a commercially controlled bomb differ from a government controlled bomb?

No use trying to convince me the waste is not dangerous, because the first crap they are dumping here in west Texas at our brand new dump near Andrews, Texas, is from Hanford, where this stuff leaked AFTER it was cleaned up AFTER it leaked once already.

Let's quit making anything up and just admit that there has never been a reactor built that has not had some type of uncontrolled or unplanned discharge, and that these discharges often have half lives of many thousands of years, whereas carbon dioxide can be processed by simply planting more plants.

Nuclear reactors, whether used for power or for bombs, are dangerous, leaky, and hazardous, and no solution has ever been advanced for the safe disposal of their waste products, unlike other wastes in the environment.

It is just another kind of lying to obfuscate the difference between reactors for commercial business and reactors for the government. Kinda like saying the diesels used in government trucks are different altogether from diesels used in commercial trucks.

[robinlynne]

3. gotta love the concept of safe nuclear power...

[originalpckelly]

4. I thought nuclear energy was environmentally friendly...

and a solution to global warming?

You mean that GE lied to me about their nuclear reactors?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16457080/

[acmavm]

6. Just something else that people don't understand, can't manage or

control, foisted on the public in the name of progress.

[PittPoliSci]

7. when was this plant commissioned?

[Raksha]

10. The Hanford Atomic Reservation is NOT a power plant!

It was a facility for the production of nuclear weapons. The bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki was produced at Hanford. Containment and control of nuclear waste were NOT well understood at the time, and there was massive contamination, illness and death in the area for decades as a result.

I know more about this facility than I ever wanted to know, and I learned about it the hard way. I've mentioned this before on DU, but I don't feel like getting into it now.

[kineneb]

22. yup, one big toxic mess

for the folks on DU who don't know what is stored at Hanford... it is a "burialground" for the military's hazardous materials... the stuff they can't figure out what to do with...

Try both radioactive and non-radioactive toxic wastes, placed in in-ground containers, many of which are single walled. That is why the leaks. Also the intersting fact in the "old days" when a container started to leak, they just pumped the contents into another available nearby container, thus creating a toxic (and corrosive) stew. Later, someone figured out that they should be using double-walled containers, and pumped the mixtures into them. Apparently, not all the single-wall units have been emptied, or the double-wall units are also beginning to leak. I think Scientific American or other mag. had an article on it about 10 years ago, along with diagrams of the direction of the underground toxic plume from the leaks.

[Ian David]

9. See prior thread: Workers evacuated after leak in Hanford, WA nuclear tank farm

Workers evacuated after leak in Hanford, WA nuclear tank farm
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=116&topic_id=15840&mesg_id=15840

[hankthecrank]

12. Kicked & R n/t

[Mojambo]

14. It's probably some viral marketing stunt for the Simpsons movie. n/t

[hankthecrank]

18. Kicked

Nuclear no good no matter what grumpy the flip flopper says

[NorthernSpy]

19. nuclear energy is GREEN energy -- hot, angry glowing green energy...

It's always seeking out faults and cracks, always ready to burst its confining vessel and incinerate us all with invisible light.

We have tried to bind a god. Given half a chance, it will kill as many of us as it can, and then corrupt the survivors down to the last cell.

And even if we admit that the nuclear age was a terrible mistake, we are still bound to serve this thing for the ten thousand years until it loses its energy. If we stop tending it, it will outlast any vessel we build to contain it, and then it will be loose.



Sorry, but that's how I feel about it.

[Dogmudgeon]

27. That's not reason, that's *superstition*

Nuclear energy is not some kind of evil spirit or god. It is the energy released when unstable atoms decay. (And even the word "decay" is a metaphor for an energy-releasing transformation.)

How long will we be "bound to serve" the toxic metal poisons we have purified, by the millions of tons, since the 1600s? Unlike nuclear material, they will not decay until their protons do. That will take about 10^46 years. Poisons are forever.

Whatever we decide for energy, we should not give in to atavistic fear ... Superstition ain't the way.

--p!

[Omaha Steve]

20. Jimmy Carter went into 3 mile island right after the event....

President Carter was qualified with nuclear energy from his navy days. The bubble could have burst at any time. Where was pro-nuke W the last few days after this became government knowledge?

[hankthecrank]

29. Kicked n/t

[govegan]

30. Additional info.

Seattle P/I: Radioactive leak discovered at Hanford nuclear reservation

link: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/6420ap_wa_hanford_leak.html

Progress made in cleaning Hanford's K West Basin

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/6420ap_wa_hanford_waste.html

It seems rather ironical to call this a "nuclear reservation". It's not like the US Govt. has done particularly well by the Indians on their reservations.

The contaminated ground was contained to keep the leak from spreading and officials were determining how best to clean the area, Ballinger said.

Typically, many more than 50 workers would have been on hand, but many had Friday off work, she said.

Bury my sludge in the wounded earth.
Let fly the warheads, let mayhem increase.
No need to contemplate the horrors they birth,
With clouds they create let daylight cease.
We can sing to the glory of deception and lies,
Down on the rez as the radiation slowly dies.