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Tunnel With Radioactive Waste Collapses – No Real Solution In Sight
The Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state is said to be the most polluted site in the United States. Part of it are the ruins of PUREX, a Plutonium Uranium Extraction Facility that has been used to produce Plutonium for nuclear weapons from World War II on throughout the Cold War. Extracting Plutonium from used Uranium fuel is a chemical process hat leaves aggressive and highly radioactive waste.
On Tuesday an incident occurred at the the site. A sinkhole appeared above an old railroad tunnel which is full of radioactive equipment. Workers are now filling the hole with 50 truckloads of dirt. Officials claim that no release of chemicals or radioactivity occurred.
The old railroad tunnel at the side has been used to store radioactive machinery and fuel containers:
Railroad cars loaded with contaminated equipment were backed into the tunnel by a remotely operated engine and left there, with the door eventually sealed closed.
Radiation levels of wastes stored there would be lethal to humans within an hour, according to Heart of America Northwest, a Seattle-based Hanford watchdog group.
The tunnel was used from 1960 to 1965. In 1964 a longer and more reinforced tunnel was added at PUREX.
The original tunnel offers little protection:
The rail tunnel was built in 1956 out of timber, concrete and steel, topped by 8 feet of dirt. It was 360 feet long (110 meters).
Competent engineers built these tunnels.
(/snark)
Still, it is likely that problems with these tunnels will increase over time. Theys need immediate attention. Unfortunately not everyone is of that opinion:
[T]he Energy Department last year received permission to delay removing waste from the tunnels until 2042. The waste was supposed to be gone by 2024,
Here are lists of the various loads (1, 2, 3) the railway cars in the tunnels are carrying. Some of them are radiating with up to 500 rem per hour.
Doses greater than 100 rem received over a short time period are likely to cause acute radiation syndrome (ARS), possibly leading to death within weeks if left untreated.
Much lower doses, received over longer periods of time, will significantly increase the risk of cancer.
The tunnels and the radioactive machinery in them are not the only imminent problem at Hanford. The site also holds 200 million liters of radioactive waste stored in 177 double-walled concrete tanks, Some of these tanks, built underground 40 years ago, are leaking aggressive and radioactive chemicals.
As long as the waste stays in place at the Hanford site the immediate danger from it is only relevant to the nearby communities. But a large fire or a natural catastrophe could distribute highly radioactive particles over very large areas.
Tens of billions have been spent in research and pilot facilities to treat radioactive waste and to encapsulate it in glass. Finding final safe storage sites continues to be a problem. Real progress is still missing. Unless the societies decide to set the safe storage of radioactive waste as a priority it will take 50 or more years until the cleanups in Hanford and elsewhere are finished.
An international crash program could significantly shorten that time-span and remove the dangerous waste from various leaky storage sites all over the world. But unless there is some very large incident with significant casualties such a project is unlikely to begin.
The insanely toxic nuclear wastes created through the production of nuclear weapons and the use of nuclear power must be isolated from the biosphere for periods of time beyond human comprehension. Hundreds of thousands of tons of high-level wastes (now mostly in the form of spent or used fuel rods, sitting in pools next to nuclear power plants) must be stored for at least 100,000 years, otherwise (at the very least) vast areas of the Earth will become uninhabitable radioactive wastelands.
The 53 million gallons of highly-radioactive liquid wastes at Hanford were created when spent/used fuel assemblies were dissolved in nitric acid, in order to separate the plutonium (created in the rods by the bombardment of uranium with neutrons), so that the plutonium could be used for US nuclear weapons.
Yes, nuclear power was designed to make plutonium for weapons, not electricity, which has made the two processes inseparable and has led to the creation of thousands of tons of plutonium, a substance which previously only existed in nature infinitesimal quantities. 15 millionths of a gram of plutonium, if inhaled, will cause lung cancer; a few thousandths of a gram, if inhaled, will kill you from pulmonary fibrosis. About 2000 metric tons of plutonium have been produced by nuclear power plants (reactor grade plutonium is also weapons-usable). Plutonium has a half-life of 24,100 years; figure 10 half-lives (241,000 years) for about 1/1000th of it to still remain in the biosphere.
According to Robert Alvarez, about 40% of the long-lived radioactivity that resides in spent fuel pools comes from radioactive Cesium. http://www.ips-dc.org/spent_nuclear_fuel_pools_in_the_us_reducing_the_deadly_risks_of_storage/ The radionuclide cesium137 has a half-life of 30 years. Its most common chemical forms are highly water soluble and will easily make their way into contaminated ecosystems; because cesium is in the same atomic family as potassium (it mimics potassium), plants tend to selectively absorb cesium, especially those plants that are rich in potassium (mushrooms, berries). Cesium will also bioconcentrate and bioaccumulate as it moves up the food chains.
When the Chernobyl reactor exploded and burned, most of the radioactive cesium in the ruptured and burning fuel rods became a gas and escaped to be distributed by the winds (cesium is highly volatile element that becomes a liquid at 83F and a gas at 1240F). Look at a map of the closed zone of Chernobyl and notice that the key to the map specifies the amount of cesium137 per square kilometer: land containing greater than 40 curies of cesium137 makes the land uninhabitable (see https://www.pinterest.com/pin/427560558346504475/ ).
There are 88 curies of radiation per gram of cesium 137, thus less than half a gram of cesium 137 made into a gas and evenly distributed over a square kilometer will leave that land uninhabitable for one to three centuries. This translates into 1.2 grams of cesium per square mile (a US dime weights 2.7 grams). There is about a ton of radioactive cesium in each of the spent fuel pools that sit next to US nuclear power plants (about 104 such pools).
Chernobyl released a small fraction of the cesium137 found in a single US spent fuel pool. These are some of the consequences from the Chernobyl release (see http://thebulletin.org/chernobyl-fukushima-and-preparedness-next-one/nuclear-power-asking-wrong-questions ):
–The International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, in a 2011 report called “Health Effects of Chernobyl,” found that 25 years after the disaster, more than 90 percent of “liquidators”—the soldiers and civilians, numbering at least 740,000, who fought to contain the reactor fire and clean up afterwards—were severely ill or had become invalids.
–According to the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, between 12,000 and 83,000 genetically damaged children will eventually be born in “affected countries of the Chernobyl region,” while 30,000 to 207,000 such children will be born worldwide due to the disaster. These cases will take time to appear—only 10 percent of the overall expected damage can be seen in the first generation after exposure.
–The “TORCH-2016” report, an independent scientific evaluation of Chernobyl’s health effects based entirely upon peer-reviewed sources, finds that about 5 million people in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia live in areas still highly contaminated by the Chernobyl disaster (with more than 40 kilobecquerels of cesium-137 per square meter). These areas include 18,000 square kilometers in Belarus, 12,000 square kilometers in Ukraine, and 16,000 square kilometers in Russia. About 400 million people live in less contaminated areas (with between 4 and 40 kilobecquerels of cesium-137 per square meter).
–The unfortunate people who must live on these contaminated lands—especially infants and children—suffer greatly from the effects of the long-lived radionuclides (primarily cesium-137) that have contaminated the forests, soils, and foodstuffs to which they are constantly exposed. In 2011, the National Ministry of Emergencies of Ukraine issued a national report entitled “Twenty-five Years after Chernobyl Accident: Safety for the Future.” The report found that by 2001, no more than 10 percent of the children living in the seriously contaminated zones of Ukraine were considered healthy. Prior to the dispersal of radionuclides from the Chernobyl explosion, 90 percent had been healthy.
There truly is no end in sight for dealing with radioactive waste. It is madness to continue to make more of this evil stuff and foolish to allow hundreds of thousands of tons of it to sit in spent fuel pools, which must be constantly cooled — otherwise they will heat to boiling, exposing the fuel assemblies to steam and air, which will allow them to rupture and in some cases ignite.
For an excellent documentary on the construction of geologic storage for high-level waste in Finland, see “Onkalo, Into Eternity” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HArxuzs1AA
Posted by: Perimetr | May 11 2017 15:42 utc | 18
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