Energy Department Permanently Closes Damaged Hanford Nuclear Reservation Tank (tri-cityherald.com) 69
The Department of Energy has decided to close the oldest double-shell tank at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The department says that Tank AY-102 has widespread damage and should not be repaired. The Tri-City Herald reports: DOE was required by Ecology, a regulator for Hanford's tanks storing radioactive and chemical waste, to empty enough waste from the tank to determine the cause of the leak by spring 2017. DOE confirmed in 2012 that waste from the inner shell of the tank was slowly leaking into the space between its inner and outer shells. No waste is known to have breached the outer shell to contaminate the soil beneath the tank. One of the goals of the inspection was to decide whether the tank could be repaired and returned to service, a scenario that appeared unlikely. Hanford has just 27 double-shell tanks, excluding Tank AY-102, to hold waste emptied from 149 leak-prone single shell tanks until the waste can be treated for disposal. Plans call for glassifying much of the waste at the vitrification plant under construction at Hanford. The waste is left from World War II and Cold War production of plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons program.
So (Score:1)
Who's the dumbfuck who place the "Power" icon on this story?
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Who's the dumbfuck who place the "Power" icon on this story?
The development of nuclear weaponry during WWII gave the U.S. the destructive power to end the Pacific theater conflict, and political power to help push the war to its conclusion. : D
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Only one reactor (N) produced electricity (in addition to its primary isotope mission). The other dozen or so reactors were isotope production only.
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The power icon is always with the 'murika flag.
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I think msmanisHD has trademarked a hat, or something.
Location (Score:2)
For anyone else who doesn't know everything DOE, it is located in southern Washington State.
Re:Point? (Score:5, Insightful)
Am I missing something?
Why yes. Yes you are.
This is an opportunity to condemn the US for its reckless cold war behavior. Also, there are obvious and fun equivalences your supposed to make between the Soviet Union and the US. Further, there are tangential green energy angles to this as well, which you should have picked up on by the subtle conflation of weapons production with and energy supply among the icons assigned to the story. These arguments should to be at hand at all times in case some trumpanzee mentions Chernobyl or Kysthym and you need to step in with the necessary whataboutism.
Remember, the US is a xenophobic, homophobic planet wrecking slave state infested by genocidal Christian white life and we're relying on people like you to keep yourself armed with the correct views at all times.
Carry on, Internet warrior!
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The Russians have a really good record on nuclear safety. Mostly as the places where the accidents occurred did not exist Kyshtym actually Chelyabinsk-65 (which was renamed Ozyorsk in the early 1990s), or is it City 40 [mentalfloss.com]
Re:Point? (Score:4, Insightful)
Spot on. Primary containment fails: decision tree is to repair or take out of service prior to a sufficiently high risk that the secondary containment fails.
Since the vitrification plant is behind schedule and has some risks in terms of long-term effectiveness, the loss of the tank is a disappointment, but not the end of the world.
Re: Point? (Score:4, Informative)
Having competence and not having something devolve into a completely horrible shit show at Hanford actually is news. This is the most polluted site in the US, an area bigger than Los Angeles, with 53 million gallons of high-level radioactive waste and caustic solvents of largely unknown mixture in shoddy tanks, as well as 25 million cubic feet of solid radioactive waste, sitting on top of 200 square miles of contaminated groundwater from said leaky shoddy tanks, right next to the major watershed for the Pacific Northwest, which they also have dumped millions of terabecquerels of radioactive material in over the years of operation.
From having lived downwind of this fucking apocalyptic shithole, it actually does come as a surprise that they haven't completely fucked the dog for once.
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This is the most polluted site in the US
Child, please. It's not even in the top twenty [thedailybeast.com].
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Maybe I'm missing something, but a tank had a leak, but since it is double walled nothing escaped and they agreed to stop using it and have a plan to deal with the waste.
Am I missing something?
Is the fact that the federal government does have competent people in it that can do their jobs really news? I could see maybe if there was a political angle, where despite Trump's best efforts the EPA managed to get significant work done, but it is not even that.
Is there some imminent danger I'm missing?
The real problem here is what the tanks contain. Nobody is really sure, just bad stuff that's highly radioactive.
They contain waste from Platinum production, mostly waste after the platinum is pulled from the fuel elements. The waste could be anything, no records were kept.
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They know what the tanks are made of, and the corrosiveness of the contents.
Do they actually know how corrosive the contents are? My understanding is that they barely even know what's in the tanks.
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The tanks are old. They are actually still in service past their design life.
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They do not know the corrosiveness of the contents. The hell mix inside those tanks is a self-heating ongoing chemical reaction in a pressure cooker that involves unstable radioactive isotopes that are changing from one element to another. They know that whatever is in there now is very different from the highly corrosive and radioactive materials that were put into the waste stream 70+ years ago. And if any government agency had actually kept a record of what was put into that waste back then, they are not
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> They do not know the corrosiveness of the contents. The hell mix inside those tanks is a self-heating ongoing chemical reaction in a pressure cooker that involves unstable radioactive isotopes that are changing from one element to another.
A nuclear reaction. It's radioactive decay that makes them hot. The reasons why they're corrosive can be broadly understood pretty easily, too-- warm. liquid-phase stuff with a lot of salts in it eats metals; you can do things for corrosion resistance but given deca
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Surely you mean Plutonium, not Platinum?
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Surely you mean Plutonium, not Platinum?
Yes, thank you.
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po-TAY-toe
po-TAH-toe
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"platinum production"
We wish! :-) Actually, plutonium production.
The waste isn't "anything". It is reasonably well characterized, and there are plenty of records. It's just that there is no cheap way to deal with it.
Re:Point? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe I'm missing something, but a tank had a leak, but since it is double walled nothing escaped and they agreed to stop using it and have a plan to deal with the waste.
Am I missing something?
Why, yes: This leak has essentially rendered the new double-walled tank into a single walled tank.
Now, what is the Hanford site most famous for? It's the fact that so many of its single-walled tanks have leaked like sieves. So now we have a new potential sieve.
Re: Location (Score:1)
Re:Repurpose it (Score:4, Funny)
Flaws (in otherwise perfect and well thought out plan)...Superpowers. SuperBum, InvisibleBum, SpiderBum, SchizoCatWoman...also that's how you get zombies.
Sell it... Step 3: Profit (Score:2)
Permantly Closed? (Score:1)
Re:Permantly Closed? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is waste from cold-war era weapons production, it has nothing to do with waster from power production.
The dry storage of high level wastes at nuclear plants is actually working fine, because among other things the amount of waste is small, certainly compared to the amount of energy generated. (There isn't another power source that could possibly do this, by the way: "oh well, let's just keep it all here for now".)
You see, you are not some genius who's discovered a problem no one has ever thought about, and no, there is no vast conspiracy to prevent clean-ups of spills.
There is, however an interesting feature planted inside your skull that prevents you from hearing anyone who says anything remotely sensible on the subject-- no doubt we're all shills from the conspiracy, right?
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"thousands of reactors worldwide"
Actually the world has built way fewer than even one thousand reactors.
And don't confuse commercial power nukes with the Hanford stuff. That was WW II and cold war production and they made a mess. Cleaning it up is a difficult technical challenge.
The commercial nuclear stuff is a much smaller problem, mostly financial. The actual physical volume of used fuel rods in the world isn't that great compared to many other pollution problems.