Nuke Waste Watcher

Mobile repositories

2005-06-28T09:55:00.000-07:00

The Department of Energy (DOE) announced two weeks ago it's getting ready to ship out 2000 trucks of spent-fuel reprocessing waste from its West Valley, New York facility. The only problem is no-one will accept it.
The federal law defining nuclear waste says all of West Valley's wastes are high-level and must be buried in mountains, not just under 40 feet of dirt as happens at low-level disposal sites. West Valley says it has separated the most lethal substances from the waste and will send them to Yucca Mountain, but the law doesn't allow separations. Besides, according to whose standards were the wastes separated? West Valley's? And how do we know the materials in the drums being shipped out don't contain some of those lethal substances? The mere affixing of a label on the side of a drum doesn't mysteriously transform the contents. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 specifically states that all reprocessing waste must be buried in repositories. When faced with trusting West Valley or trusting the law, states are going to go with the law. The only way anybody's going to accept West Valley's waste is if Congress changes the law. I discussed this problem in my March 9 post, "Law-exempt DOE."
It's ironic that this problem surfaces at the same time Americans are calling for reprocessing as a way to reduce America's nuclear waste. In only six years of operation (1966-72), West Valley, the site of the nation's only commercial spent-fuel rod reprocessing facility, generated nearly a million gallons of uranium-tainted acids. Doesn't sound like a reduction to me!
Meanwhile, while West Valley's trucks are roaming about the country looking for a home, it might be wise for us to invest in Geiger counters so we can check for radioactivity from abandonned trailers on the sides of roads.

[Source: http://www.theithacajournal.com/news/stories/20050617/localnews/2163378.html]

Ron Bourgoin
June 28, 2005

'Safe' Scandanavian repositories

2005-06-20T09:24:00.000-07:00

To get the American people to believe that burial of highly radioactive wastes in rock is a good idea, politicians every now and then will talk about the wonderful geologic repositories that are in operation in other parts of the world.
First of all, there are no rock repositories open anywhere.
Secondly, the first country to open a geologic repository more than likely will be Finland, due to open its granite site in 2020. Yucca Mountain in Nevada was supposed to be the world's first spent-fuel rod burial facility, but that is not on the horizon at this time.
I don't know why Scandanavians insist on building high-level nuclear waste sites on the sea, but Finland's is on the Gulf of Bothnia, in the town of Eurajoki, on the country's west coast. The nearest large city is Rauma.
The Finnish parliament voted in 2001 to develop the granite site, awarding the contract to the Posiva Company. Work is in progress now to study how well the rock can contain the wastes. If all looks good to parliament in 2010, thumbs-up will be given to proceed to dynamite and drill tunnels, which, of course, will change the ability of the site to safely store wastes.
As I reported not long ago, the Swedes are building their repository near the Baltic Sea, in the town of Oskarsham, on Sweden's southeast coast. That site is being dynamited and drilled also, creating what could be a nasty situation. The waste from Sweden could leak and migrate south to Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, and Germany, whereas Finland's could make its way to Sweden. Not good!

Ron Bourgoin
June 20, 2005

Eternity metal

2005-06-14T08:58:00.000-07:00

Thanksgiving would be an appropriate time to open a repository: while Americans are stuffing turkeys, the DOE can be stuffing a mountain.
The DOE says the cans it'll stuff in mountains will hold waste for at least 10,000 years. The newest forever metal from which cans will be made was developed at Lehigh University. [http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-04/lu-nav040405.php]
I don't have a problem with claims made about the lifetime of can metal. What I have a problem with is man working inside the mountain repository. Cans will be smashed into cans, and cans will be smashed against mountain walls. Cans will be put on top of cans, and the ones on the bottom will spill their contents. Before the final sealant's applied to close the mountain off for eternity, lethal uranium and plutonium will already be migrating outward to soil and ground water. Politicians can talk all they want to about how cans will simply be retrieved in case high levels of radiation are measured coming from the mountain, but the fact is no-one's going to do that. If it takes 30 years to fill a mountain, it'll certainly take no less to empty it, and by that time it'll be too late to save the area.
We have to remember that Yucca Mountain, for instance, is slated to be stuffed with 20,000 cans. That job's got to get very boring after a while, which is when problems will begin. We can all expect the first 100 cans will be entered in the mountain according to specs, especially with the public and smiling DOE, NRC, and EPA officials watching. But what worries me is what bored mountain stuffers will do with can numbers 101 to 20,000.
Whether Yucca opens or not doesn't erase the fact that this will happen in any repository.

Ron Bourgoin
June 14, 2005

Second to none

2005-06-06T10:12:00.000-07:00

Congressman David Hobson (R-Ohio) has begun referring to the second-named national geologic repository as "Yucca Mountain Two." [see http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2005/may/13/518752628.html ]
Because Yucca Mountain One is down on the canvas nearing the end of the ten count, it could very well be that the second-named nuclear repository will be the first to open.
By law, the second geologic burial facility can be named by Congress the year after next. In view of the fact that nearly 25 years are required from naming to opening, it'll be 2030 before a repository opens.
When it was decided to develop only Yucca Mountain in 1987, several people felt that one of the other two sites on the list of first repositories (Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State, and a site in Deaf Smith County, Texas) should be developed as a backup in case Yucca Mountain didn't meet muster. Had an alternate site been built, we'd be opening a repository in 2010. It's doubtful Congress will make that mistake again.
In 2007, look for Congress to name not only a second site but also a backup site. On the list for the second repository and alternate site are the states of Maine, New Hampshire, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

Ron Bourgoin
June 6, 2005

"Who ordered all this?"

2005-05-31T08:09:00.000-07:00

When Vice President Dick Cheney was shown America's nuclear capability, he said "Who ordered all this?" ["Dropping the Bomb," Newsweek, June 25, 2001]
That's a good question.
According to physics doctoral student Bob Johnston at the University of Texas at Dallas, the U.S. has made between 66,000 and 70,000 nuclear warheads. [http://pages.prodigy.net/wrjohnston/nuclear/wrjp205.html]
Sitting in 228 behemoth tanks at two defense facilities are 87 million gallons of plutonium-laced chemical wastes from the production of all those nuclear weapons. If we were to load the waste on tractor-trailer trucks, the trucks would form a line 50 miles long. The next time you drive that distance, imagine a stagnant line of trucks all along that length waiting to be unloaded.
The anonymous purchasing agents who ordered the bombs also ordered the chemicals that we now have to bury in mountains. Two mountains are needed for these wastes alone, and another mountain is needed for spent-fuel rods.
The amount of fuel we'll deplete to transport all these nuclear wastes has to be considered these days. Transportation to just one facility will require depletion of at least one million gallons of petroleum-derived fuel, so we're looking at a minimum of 3 million gallons to carry the wastes to the three sites.
Can we afford to do that?

Ron Bourgoin
May 31, 2005

Hanford hands holler Help!

2005-05-23T08:57:00.000-07:00

And their cry for help has been heard.
The workers are complaining of shortness of breath, dizziness, and nosebleeds, even though they are wearing proper protective equipment when working near Hanford's 177 liquid nuclear-waste tanks.
A recent study revealed over 1400 different chemicals in the vapors from the tanks. Because many of the chemicals have been sitting in those tanks for over 50 years, completely new, exotic chemical compounds have formed, the occupational hazards of which have yet to be determined.
Beginning Thursday, May 26, a program begun by Dr. Tim Takaro will offer Hanford's tank-farm workers free physical exams, chest x-rays, respiratory analysis, and blood tests. He has spent the past few months setting up screening clinics in proximity of the Richland, Washington site.
Dr. Takaro is with the University of Washington's program in Occupational and Environmental Medicine in Seattle. Hanford worker screenings will be paid through November by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), although he's confident the funding will continue beyond that. We hope so, considering 1370 people work right at the tanks (Onsite-1) and another 3900 work in the vicinity (Onsite-2).
It behooves tank-farm employees at the Energy Department's Savannah River Site in Aiken, South Carolina to press for the same screenings since they are exposed to the same sort of vapors.
[Reference: "DOE offers tank farm workers options," Annette Cary, Tri-City Herald, Mar. 4, 2005]

Ron Bourgoin
May 23, 2005

Mountain subs

2005-05-16T08:15:00.000-07:00

The Department of Energy (DOE) on May 11 announced it wants to bury hull sections of nuclear submarines inside mountains. These hull sections contain submarines' spent nuclear reactors.
Refueling a nuclear submarine is quite a bit different than refueling a commercial reactor. In a commercial reactor, spent-fuel rods are removed and replaced by fresh uranium fuel. In a sub, the entire hull section containing the nuclear reactor is cut out and a new reactor section is welded back in.
The U.S. has 92 of these hull sections awaiting deep burial. There will be at least that many again as most subs are approaching decommissioning.
These cut-out hull sections are quite impressive: they are four to five times taller and wider than the heavyhaul trucks that transport them.
The DOE says it's considering other disposal options, such as shallow burial at federal or private facilities, but that's exactly how the sections are buried now. The hull sections are sitting under 40 feet of dirt at Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Richland, Washington, but expect these to move to geologic repositories as soon as possible.
(I've always wondered why the size of the entrance tunnel in repositories is so large, and now I know.)
I suppose the DOE was emptying its Bad News file because it announced at the same time that portions of commercial-reactor cores are going to mountains too. That answers the question of where Three Mile Island's molten reactor core's going.
[Source: Federal Register, May 11, 2005, Volume 70, Number 90, Page 24775-24778]

Ron Bourgoin
May 16, 2005

Repository #3:List

2005-05-09T08:39:00.000-07:00

Last week I wrote about the fact that one mountain will be needed for Hanford Nuclear Reservation's most dangerous nuclear wastes; another mountain will be needed for Savannah River's; and still yet another for spent-fuel rods from our nuclear reactors. ("U.S.:World's nuclear dump," May 2)
Unless the Department of Energy (DOE) abandons its geologic burial program for high-level nuclear wastes, this nation has to have at least three mountains to safely isolate lethal radioactive wastes from humans.
I looked to see if the federal government has given any hints of the need for at least three deep geologic repositories. I found such in a 1986 report to Congress. In that report, the Energy Department presented not only candidate sites for the second repository but also a list of additional sites for subsequent repositories. This supplementary list contained eight sites in four states. These states and the number of sites in each are: GA (1); MN (5); VA (1); WI (1).
Perhaps those states were already aware that they are on the appended list, but if not, they can find the exact locations of the sites in the report. ["Briefing on the Draft Area Recommendation Report for the U.S. Congress," January 16, 1986. Available for $2.29 from Texas Tech University Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library. This report is listed to be in Box 31, Folder 19 of the Nuclear Waste Management Records Collection #S-1502.1]

Ron Bourgoin
May 9, 2005

U.S.:World's nuclear dump

2005-05-02T08:41:00.000-07:00

We don't even have room for our own, yet we've agreed to dump here in the states Australia's commercial-grade spent fuel rods. [http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,12003697%5E421,00.html, "US to be Aussie nuclear dump," Amanda Hodge, Jan. 21, 2005]
Who at our Department of Energy is making such deals?.
This nuclear waste from the Aussies is not the weapons-grade uranium the U.S. sent out to them and over 40 other nations in the 1950s as part of the Atoms for Peace program. [Yes, Iran was a recipient. See http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/544522.cms]
The original deal was that all the bomb-grade uranium would be returned to the U.S. for burial, although only 29 nations have done so.
America now has an enormous inventory of repository-bound nuclear waste. Hanford site's most extremely dangerous waste will require one mountain; another will be needed for Savannah River's most dangerous waste; and one more for spent-fuel rods from our nuclear reactors. That brings the minimum total to three, but we can't even open one.
There's talk now of building new reactors and new nuclear weapons, but we can't continue simply accumulating wastes from these products and doing nothing about them.

Ron Bourgoin
May 2, 2005

What's in those tanks?

2005-04-25T08:08:00.000-07:00

You will observe, dear reader, that the Department of Energy calls its wastes in tanks at Savannah River and Hanford sites "weapons-processing wastes." There's a reason for that careful wording. Just because the wastes are at nuclear facilities does not mean the wastes are entirely nuclear.
The types of wastes from the processing of nuclear weapons are actually few in number, but a survey of the chemicals in tank vapors last year found over 1400 different chemicals! And what was especially frightening was the fact that some were so exotic and so new that occupational hazard levels for them have not been established. ["First review of tank waste released," Tri-City Herald, Oct. 15, 2004]
It was further reported that the waste composition in each of Hanford's 177 tanks is different: no two are alike. What bothered me particularly was the presence of several organic substances. ["Industrial Hygiene Chemical Vapor Technical Basis," CH2M Hill Hanford Group (a DOE contractor), Oct. 2004. See especially the Government Accountability Office's response to the study, http://www.whistleblower.org/nuclear/TechBasis.pdf]
A recent study by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, an arm of the Centers for Disease Control, found 2 out of every 3 tank-farm workers complained of dizziness and shortness of breath, even though the workers are wearing protective equipment. Obviously the protective equipment's not protecting!

Ron Bourgoin
April 25, 2005

World's repository woes

2005-04-18T10:30:00.000-07:00

We aren't the only ones having problems with a nuclear repository for highly radioactive wastes.
It's beginning to seem the 1957 decision to bury spent-fuel rods and military plutonium-stripping acids in deep underground tunnels is not such a good idea.
In France, the decision was to bury their high-level wastes in hardened clay about 1500 feet deep. The facility is in Bure, about 100 miles east of Paris. The problem there is that water pockets have been found in the clay. Water in contact with radiation makes acid, which is the last thing you want surrounding a metal can holding radioactive wastes. "But the water's moving extremely slow," says Jack-Pierre Piguet, the facility's director. In his newsletter, he's come up with an obscure physics law about how slowly water migrates through solid clay and assures the French they have nothing to worry about, but look for the French to worry.
In Sweden, the 1200-foot deep granite repository at Oskarsham, right on the Baltic Sea, 100 miles south of Stockholm, has become so cracked from dynamiting and tunnel boring that sealant has had to be applied everywhere. Do you know of a sealant that can seal for 10,000 years? Neither do I. The problem I have with that facility is that when it begins leaking, its contaminants will make their way to the U.S. by way of the Atlantic Ocean.
[Source: "La Vie du Labo", numbers 26 and 27 (in French). See http://www.andra.fr]

Ron Bourgoin
April 18, 2005

The discovered waiting to be discovered

2005-04-11T08:57:00.000-07:00

Why subject the American people to the turmoil of transporting and burying highly radioactive wastes if we don't have to?
A development in Japan announced 8 months ago looks very promising.
Everyone's familiar with the picture of the atom as a miniature solar system. What the Japanese have done is feed the "planets" to the "sun."
It's important to caution everyone right now, says Tsutomu Ohtsuki, that the discovery is not yet ready to eliminate nuclear wastes. We appreciate the honesty, but it's important to note that Professor Ohtsuki's group has speeded up radioactivity. Even if his team doesn't accomplish complete annihilation of nuclear waste, accelerating radioactivity is a significant accomplishment.
Dr. Ohtsuki works at Tohoku University's Nuclear Science Laboratory in Sendai, about 100 miles north of Yokohama. An article was published on 9 Sept. in the physics journal Physical Review Letters [Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 112501 (2004)]. News of the discovery was posted by the English on 21 Sept. [http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/8/9/12/1].
It seems to me reasonable that the U.S. should pursue parallel efforts as soon as possible. The present $60 million a year we're spending on experiments to change atoms from one type to another (transmutation) is not solving the nuclear waste problem. If it could, it would be doing it.

Ron Bourgoin
April 11, 2005

While Congress looks the other way

2005-04-04T12:34:00.000-07:00

The Department of Energy's treatment of high-level nuclear waste as low-level is having severe consequences on worker health. There is a backlog of 25,000 toxic-exposure claims against the DOE, which the U.S. Department of Labor has recently taken control of.
How many people are being maimed annually by plutonium- , cesium- , and strontium-laced carcinogenic vapors? At the end of last year, the inspector general reported there were 14,000 employees and 100,000 contractor personnel working at DOE sites [DOE/IG-0667, Nov. 2004]. Considering that most are at defense facilties, it's safe to say several tens of thousands ingest those lethal vapors each year.
How much longer will Congress look the other way?
A publication the DOE will certainly want to stamp Secret if it's given authorization to hide certain of its publications is the following assertion that it has no intention of obeying Congress' mandate regarding the 87 million gallons of weapons-processing waste at Hanford and Savannah River sites: "Although the total volume of the waste is considered high-level waste, it is neither cost-effective nor practical to treat and dispose of all of the waste to meet the requirements of the high-level waste repository program and the Nuclear Waste Policy Act." [Radioactive Tank Waste Remediation Focus Area: Technology Summary, Aug. 1996, page 47]
Ouch!

Ron Bourgoin
April 4, 2005

Plutonium hors d'oeuvre

2005-03-29T08:26:00.000-08:00

I was celebrating my one-month anniversary of my 20th birthday. It was January 17, 1966. I was in the Navy, serving in the Mediterranean. We received a Mayday disaster signal: a B-52 loaded with four plutonium bombs crashed into a KC-135 inflight fueler. When we arrived, only four of the eleven crew members could be found, and only three of the bombs. Plutonium in two of them had vaporized. Radiation was everywhere. The Spanish government wanted us to burn all vegetation and dig up all the topsoil, which, of course, dispersed even more plutonium in the air. Then came the job of finding the missing bomb.
Crash experts told us sonar operators of the most likely trajectories, so we scanned those areas for two months. We found nothing. Finally somebody decided to listen to the fisherman who had seen the bomb fall way out at sea. Two weeks later, the bomb was found, teeter-tottering on the edge of an underwater cliff. A special Navy vehicle equipped with mechanical arms went down after it. Yes, the pilot confirmed, it was the 1-½ megaton, 10-foot bomb. He grasped it, began pulling it up, and the bomb slipped. A thousand feet lower it went, right next to a trench!
I never saw the bomb come up: I was called back to the states, and never in my rebellious years was I so happy to obey an order.

Ron Bourgoin
March 29, 2005

Toxic Secret

2005-03-22T08:31:00.000-08:00

Who will win the tank-waste classification battle, Congress or the Energy Department? I predict Energy will win.
Congress says the wastes are high-level; D.O.E. says they're low-level. In 1999, the Department of Energy issued internal order 435.1 saying most tank wastes would be treated as low-level radioactive liquids. This means the liquids are sprayed out onto the grounds where they can evaporate. Over two million gallons are sprayed out annually. Think of the thousands of personnel exposed to these toxic vapors.
These liquids, we have to remember, are acids that contain plutonium and uranium and fission products. They weigh more than lead, about 100 lbs per gallon. Water or milk by comparison weighs 8 lbs per gallon.
All of the waste-processing buildings at Hanford and Savannah River sites are being built to treat most of these wastes as low-level. Cement will be mixed, and the amalgam will be poured into three million 55-gallon drums. Very little of the waste will be processed as high-level.
The problem will come when it's time to ship these cans out. Who will accept as low-level waste what the United States Congress has ruled is high-level?
Perhaps that's what the panels of experts from the National Academies had in mind on March 1 when they recommended "some" wastes must stay behind at the defense facilities. As you can see, "some" means most.

Ron Bourgoin
March 22, 2005

Burying the atom

2005-03-15T10:03:00.000-08:00

A second geologic spent-fuel repository is to be sought in 2007, according to law.
That will bring to 12 the number of needed high-level nuclear waste burial sites, or enough to go in 25% of the contiguous United States, an average of one in every four states. [10 repositories for defense wastes; 2 for spent-fuel rods.]
At that news, officials begin to mumble about the marvelous technology the future will develop to extract the storage cans from the ground and annihilate the contents. Let's reason that through just for a minute.
The storage cans are 8-feet wide, 18-feet long. One of them could completely fill your living room! Our present inventory of wastes can fill 90,000 cans. This is 60 years' worth of waste, so it's only the beginning.
The future supposedly will dig down a thousand feet to withdraw hundreds of thousands of these cans so it can zap the contents. Who's going to pay for all that, and why would it be done? If the future wants to extract cans because extremely high levels of radiation are being measured, you have to consider that it'll take us 25 years to bury the 50,000-lb cans, and it'll certainly take them no less time working against gravity. It'll be too late for them to do anything.

Ron Bourgoin
March 15, 2005

Law-exempt D.O.E.

2005-03-09T09:42:00.000-08:00

Any acid used on a fuel rod that's been in a nuclear reactor is, by law, high-level nuclear waste.

At West Valley, New York (near Buffalo), the DOE treated 540,000 gallons of high-level radioactive acids as low-level waste. The work was completed in September, 2002. In June, 2003, the General Accounting Office submitted to the House Energy and Commerce Committee a report entitled "Challenges to Achieving Potential Savings in DOE's High-Level Waste Cleanup Program" [GAO-03-593]. From page 16 of that report,
"At West Valley, separation of the low-activity portion from the high-level portion of the waste reduced by 90 percent the quantity of waste requiring permanent isolation and disposal at a geologic repository. The high-level portion was stabilized in a glass material (vitrified) and remains stored at the site pending completion of the high-level waste geologic repository.... The remaining low-activity portion was mixed with cement-forming materials, poured into drums where it solidified into grout (a cement-like material), and remains stored on-site, awaiting shipment to an off-site disposal facility."

In other words, if the DOE wants to treat high-level waste as low-level, it can.

Ron Bourgoin
March 9, 2005

Repositories coast-to-coast

2005-03-02T12:32:00.000-08:00

Two panels of the National Academies of Sciences, consultants to Congress, recommended on Tuesday, March 1 that "some" weapons-processing waste should stay at Hanford and Savannah River sites to prevent overloading "a central repository."
As I've shown in these postings, the acid wastes at those facilities can fill five repositories the size of the proposed Yucca Mountain repository.
And when you add glass to the acids, which you must for long-term storage, the number of repositories doubles to 10!
I cannot imagine the citizens of Washington State and South Carolina will consent to allowing many of these wastes to stay behind, especially since they've been promised by DOE 99% of the wastes would be removed by 2035. The problem then will be, where do the vitrified wastes go?
The Goshute Indians in Utah are saying they'll accept one repository's worth.
Okay, we only need to find nine more takers.

Ron Bourgoin
March 2, 2005

Mercy!

2005-02-23T13:39:00.000-08:00

I don't know about you, but I don't understand large numbers. The quantity of 87 million gallons mentioned in my Feb. 17 post is meaningless, so I've had to do something to help render the number understandable.
I checked the size of tank the gallons are in.
Only 4 such tanks can fit on a football field.
There are 228 tanks.
Which means 57 football fields are required to hold them.
Mercy!
That's almost twice the number of stadiums in the professional football league.

The Defense Department's calling for more nuclear weapons, which means an addition to the weapons-processing nuclear wastes. As many as five states may have to bury the present inventory deep underground since the Energy Department's promised Hanford Nuclear Reservation and Savannah River Site all acid wastes would be removed by 2035.

Ever get the feeling we're the ones getting nuked by our own nukes?

Ron Bourgoin
February 23, 2005

Oh my!, look at the waste!

2005-02-17T11:32:00.000-08:00

While the U.S. frets over its inventory of spent-fuel rods, which will fill one geologic repository, no attention's being paid to the five repositories' worth of weapons-processing acid waste at Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State and Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
Hanford has 53 million gallons of weapons-processing acids.
Savannah River has 34 million gallons.
That's a total of 87 million gallons. All of them high-level nuclear waste, according to the law defining nuclear waste, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, Section 2, paragraph 12, part A.
Hanford on Feb. 10, 2005 began a program to glassify the acid wastes. They intend to treat most of the waste as low-level.
The problem is that the law specifies the waste as high level.
I don't have a problem with Hanford treating most of the waste as low-level nuclear waste. There's no way this nation can find five more geologic repositories for defense waste, but I think some discussion is in order before the high-level waste is treated as low-level.
It's going to be difficult to get any state to accept as low-level what Congress ruled is high-level.
It would prevent DOE a lot of headaches later on if it got Congress involved in the issue.

Ron Bourgoin
February 17, 2005