U.S. put nuclear waste under a dome on a Pacific island. Now it’s cracking open
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Besides, if ever want a real scare go look at the maps for all the chemical munitions dumped in our oceans that we know about [2] - does not include normal munitions and such.
So while it is a problem it is not the real problem that already exist.
[1] https://marshallislands.llnl.gov/ccc/Hamilton_LLNL-TR-648143...
[2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/decaying-weapo...
”Deadly mustard gas has leaked from a First World War underwater “weapons cemetery” in the North Sea, close to the Belgian coast”
Those were trace amounts, so there is not much immediate danger, but things can get worse.
And for normal munitions, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mines_in_the_Battle_of_Messi... probably lists a few of the scariest (a few 10,000+ kg stashes of explosives buried in Belgium since World War One. One of them exploded in 1955 after a lightning strike, showing that they were still dangerous after fortie-is years; a few others still buried somewhere)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery
The Doomsday Wreck.
My friends from this area generally advise against eating at any place which advertises this too strongly. To the locals it's actually a turn off to begin with.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/03/runit-dome-pac...
Same old story. I think most of the world has given up expecting the U.S. to be any kind of responsible world citizen.
But definitely the US should improve that encasement or otherwise minimize the dangers.
That is not to say that some Federal-level support is not warranted like other Superfund sites, but that it may not be the total and complete responsibility of the US Federal government to resolve the issue, as agreed to legally by both parties.
I agree they signed an agreement, still I'd expect us to do the clean up, agreement aside, we made the mess, have what's needed to fix it. The Marshall Islander's are a poor nation that could not afford to fix this without assistance. It's the neighborly thing to do.
This is classic over-the-barrel negotiating tactics used by colonizing nations over their former colonies. The Marshall Islanders had few options here. Continue to have their sovereignty dictated from and literal lands and lives ruined by a foreign nation, or take liability for the colonizer's experimentation and some control of their future back.
Just because a choice was made, doesn't make the process just or right. It may release the United States from a legal obligation, but it doesn't excuse any ethical or moral obligations of the state to the people of the islands.
It is unfortunate, however, that states do not often act out of ethical or moral obligations unless it serves some other, broader interest. It's my fervent hope the United States chooses to act on its ethical and moral obligations, but overall a regression to the mean of state behavior can also be expected from time to time.
My more cynical self sees many more pressing and dangerous environment disasters domestically that are readily apparent and not being dealt with properly - in places where people actually vote for US politicians. This indicates to me that a fix in a United States associated state will unfortunately likely not merit the expenditure for awhile unless some legal case could be brought.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/03/23/what-lies-beneath-numec...
Unfortunately, it does not provide an average specific activity for the material stored, only a lower limit threshold. If we assume it was near this lower limit of 14.8 bq threshold (could be the case depending on how often case (3) was used) and assume mostly plutonium-239. Since isotopic distribution is unknown, this is a conservative assumption because the longer half-life will yield a larger mass in the calculation. The molar density can be calculated from the specific activity listed:
Na/m = a x hl/ln(2) = 14.8[decay/s] x 23110[yrs]/ln(2) = 1.57e13 atoms/gram = 2.61e-11 mol/gram
The mass of the dirt collected will be assumed to be wet sand with a density of 1905 kg/m^3 [2] (note that density is actually slightly higher than this due to the plutonium contained). And finally, the volume collected is 73,000 cubic meters, or 1.39e11 grams. So the total amount of plutonium is:
2.61e-11[mol/g] x 1.39e11[g] = 3.63 mol
So our envelope calculation yields about 870 grams of plutonium. So how accurate is this? It is probably on the high side after reading the paper posted by Shivetya [3]. They cite a total inventory of 545 GBq. Using the assumptions above, one would expect an inventory of 2058 GBq.
As for the effects, that’s difficult to tell. Really the two scenarios that come to mind are a constant leaching into the environment or a disaster that results in the total mass being dumped. In the latter case a disaster of that magnitude would likely disperse the material in a biased direction. In this case it would dilute relatively quickly. Impacts from the radiation would probably be apparent close by in the biased direction. A constant leak would depend on the leach rate and leak locations. The NRC defines monthly sewer release limits of material in Table 3 of 10 CFR Part 20 Appendix B - standards for protection against radiation. The number given for Pu is 84 uCi or 3.108e6 Bq. Based on the plutonium inventory calculated and neglecting material decay, the material could leach out within NRC limits over a period of 55 thousand years (2058e9/3.108e6/12). Note that this number is likely highly inflated given the assumption that all radioactive material is Pu-239 and the comparison in [3]. Using the number from [3] and assuming all activity is Pu, the duration would be 14 thousand years. However this is a rough analysis that does not account for isotopic distributions, so please take the results with a grain of salt.
[1]:https://marshallislands.llnl.gov/enewetak.php#cleanup
[2]:https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/amp/dirt-mud-densities-d_...
[3]:https://marshallislands.llnl.gov/ccc/Hamilton_LLNL-TR-648143...
Put into that context, it might not be too absurd to think leakage would remain under NRC limits if only small cracks were present (assuming those limits are actually applicable to this scenario)
I can literally think of no one I know who wouldn’t respond to me telling them “hey you should stop implicitly trusting central power” by asking what drugs I’m on if I think they implicitly trust central power.
I guess this straw man is necessary to create so some can beat it down, but as far as I can tell such people don’t actually exist.
It's required for the government to provide a "social safety net" and more broadly for the Progressive vision of society. That includes Progressive-era reforms in education and retirement, as well as Progressive inspired reforms in healthcare and welfare, esp. the Great Society.
These reforms are predicated on the notion of a government agency collecting statistical data and reviewing comments from the public to determine policy that provides baseline services and acts as a buffer to economic variance.
Note also "implicit" trust. Trust is transitive: you might trust in some service the government provides without necessarily understanding that the service relies on some centralized power. Thus you might not explicitly trust a central authority, but because you rely on the services it provides you may be implicitly trusting it.
The primary thing you would require any government for at all would be redistributive programs, but that still doesn't require uniformity of centralization. We don't even have it as it is -- the Saudis are some of the richest people in the world, they make most of their money from the US and Europe, yet they pay no income tax to either region.
Meanwhile you could implement redistributive programs even at the level of a city. There is nothing stopping New York City from imposing a land value tax and using the money to fund a UBI, if that's what they want to do.
Centralized government actually interferes with this significantly, because San Francisco or the state of California can't implement its own healthcare policies when they have the US government overriding them, and hoovering up the state's money and sending it to other states, using it for military spending or sending it back with strings attached that require it to be spent on less efficient or less appropriate programs than the state would choose to fund for itself.
You bring up a fair objection: the Progressives' big pushes for central planning were around 100 years ago, and there's no reason the same goals couldn't be met with a distributivist approach, and many novel programs rely far less on central planning.
All true, and you're going to find hundreds of people on HN who could go into far greater detail.
Outside this techno-libertarian bubble, most people have no notion of distributed anything. If you ask most people, "how can we do a major program," their conception will be a big government agency planning it out.
And they'll have reasonable arguments for why, such as economies of scale and standardization.
> Meanwhile you could implement redistributive programs even at the level of a city.
I think this hits at a problem with the original concept of "trusting a central authority" as you bring up what is a smaller central authority, but nevertheless somewhat central.
Just kidding.
Not kidding.
I can guarantee that China and Russia have similar if not worst storage problem - the difference is that the US allows this information to exist in the public. Even if those governments allowed the information to be public, what are you going to do, not for the Party/Putin? That sounds like a great way to win a free trip to Siberia or the re-education camp.
This thread has nothing to do with China/Russia/Putin etc. And yet, still somehow every discussion of US always requires criticism of Russia.
> trip to Siberia or the re-education
Please remember that USSR no longer exists.
If you want to cause political change, you need to bring something into the public discourse; make it known to the politicians and the electorate. People do this by writing their politicians, getting media attention, organising or joining political action groups, backing candidates, or even going into politics themselves.
Plenty of people will offer things you can do, but really they're only things that will treat your feeling of helplessness and not things that have any significant chance of improving these scenarios.
That's not good, but it's not some sort of catastrophic event here.
Something bad (earthquake, tsunami, etc) could still happen that causes a plant shutdown. But there's no pressure vessel (other than regular steam on the generating side) to worry about breaching. And unlike current generation reactors, where even a full scram of control rods still requires some hours of active cooling to prevent core meltdown, if the liquid-type loses power, the core drains, and that's the end of it in terms of potential radiological release. That doesn't mean it isn't a complex, difficult system to design and operate. But it's a much, much safer design by its very nature.
( https://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.ht... , it is an enjoyable essay to read. )
You are correct that flaws and surprises lurk in all human endeavors. But that does not mean that all potential errors are in the same scale or class. We do not know everything, but we know far more than nothing!
Opponents: Don't build new reactors.
<older designs have problems that still kill fewer people than any other alternative>
Opponents: See? See? You said...
Proponents: ...that newer designs are safer than older ones and even older ones are safer than alternatives. Which remains true.
...
Politics occurs here. When you ask whether something is safe, in practice what you're asking is if it's safe relative to alternatives. So solar is safe because it's safer than coal, and nuclear is safe because it's safer than solar.
But there is also an absolutist definition of safe which requires an inhuman perfection that no real technology could ever meet. Not solar, not nuclear, not biofuels, it's just an unattainable standard.
So you ask if something is safe, people say yes (meaning it's safe relative to alternatives), then you apply the impossible standard and claim that they're lying.
If you want to stop nuclear over safety with any credibility you would also have to be willing to stop everything with a worse safety record. But that's every known alternative whatsoever.
Not the case. The worst case with nuclear is much worse than with solar, even if the possibility is unlikely. We expect insanely high standards for airplanes and the standards should be even higher for nuclear plants. We should account for the possibility that civilization collapses or an unexpected event reduces a plant to rubble. In both of those cases solar is fine but nuclear is not.
It isn't. The worst case with solar is that they're manufactured with lead, cadmium and other toxic substances that pollute the environment if they're improperly manufactured or disposed of. If you abandon a solar farm, the panels get damaged by weather and then the heavy metals leech into the ground. The environmental impact of that for a solar farm with power output equal to a nuclear reactor would be as bad or worse than a nuclear meltdown.
On top of that, the real worst case for solar is that the storage technology it needs to replace carbon energy sources never becomes economical, and then without having built nuclear today, we get a level of climate change that causes human extinction.
Sure, nuclear power is not 100% safe, but its "worst case" pales in comparison to fossil fuel's "guaranteed outcome by 2100."
I'm OK with building, say, solar instead of nuclear. I'm definitely NOT OK with keeping fossil fuel where nuclear is available, while paying a lip service saying "Oh don't worry, in 30 years maybe we will switch to renewables."
I'm fairly certain nuclear catastrophe is far worse than global warming.
Though even poor management of nuclear materials very quickly eliminates the worst cases.
To use Chernobyl as an example, since that’s the worst case of an airborne release from a nuclear plant that I know of, the absolute worst case in the case of a steam explosion breaching the other reactors’ containment was contamination of a significant portion of Europe. Modern reactors are designed so that such things are almost impossible, even without competent operators.
The worst case for climate change is a mass extinction event. So while I agree with you that the worst case of nuclear is non negligible, the probabilities and scale of such events push me towards the opinion that nuclear energy is an extremely good option for limiting our use of fossil fuels in the near future.
So the worse case of nuclear power is actually global warming caused by fossil fuels. And an eye watering San up bill that has opportunity costs for decades.
Those assumptions seem extremely unfavorable to me - accidents should be less frequent and less severe with modern reactor designs and sane operating procedures. But yet, powering the US alone with solar would take approximately 17,500 square miles - and irradiated zones from nuclear accidents are less damaging to the environment than solar panels are.
Also, using 17,500 square miles doesn't equal damage. The land could be reclaimed in negligible time by removing the panels, unlike nuclear contamination.
Some details and references for this would be nice. I find it hard to believe, though of course sometimes things I find hard to believe turn out to be true :-).
There's an interesting StackOverflow post relating to this here: [0] That just deals with the size of the steam explosion though, not the potential effects. (And for reference, I've seen the largest explosion that did occur listed as ~10T equivalent)
0: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/480113/how-large...
The Chernobyl exclusion zone is a tenth of that - 1,000 square miles. 10,000 square miles is the total from one accident per decade and an average exclusion zone duration of 100 years.
> If they didn't drain water tanks it could have exploded making a huge portion of the continent uninhabitable.
It would have made a large part of the continent have higher radiation doses, but even with linear-no-threshold I don't think that France/UK/Spain/Italy would have been uninhabitable. Or even close to that. And the point was, even with the most incompetent leadership we've seen at a nuclear power plant, that didn't happen.
> Also, using 17,500 square miles doesn't equal damage. The land could be reclaimed in negligible time by removing the panels, unlike nuclear contamination.
Well, sure - you can take the solar panels and move them somewhere else if you want. But if you're using solar for power, you can't really get rid of them - just move them around.
I say that knowing we are barreling toward fantastic solar participation in the grid in many countries, and I feel it's just a matter of time before it becomes the dominant source of our energy, especially as battery solutions come into play. It's also not the end of the world to have some backup gas generators that fire up once in a blue moon. Compared to 100% fossil fuels, the occasional gas turbine firing up on a stormy week would be negligible. Alternatively, novel storage methods such as hydro storage could make even backup energy green.
There are probably cities where it wouldn't work right now, but I can't imagine there being many places where it couldn't work at all.
Solar is also problematic during winter. We need to replace fossil fuels as a heat source, but when heating with electricity at scale during winter, the demand rises at night meanwhile the days are shorter and solar generates less. Heating New York and Chicago in winter using solar and batteries doesn't have promising economics.
In many places, the winds blows powerfully at night. With a capable grid like the one China has build in the last 10 years, that energy can be efficiently moved a thousand miles.
By the time you generate power from some actual generation source, pay the conversion losses both ways and then pay the equipment, land and maintenance costs of the storage technology, it isn't cost-competitive. And then people keep burning carbon.
> In many places, the winds blows powerfully at night. With a capable grid like the one China has build in the last 10 years, that energy can be efficiently moved a thousand miles.
Wind is regionally intermittent. If it's a still night in one place there is a significant probability that it will also be a few miles from there. But transmitting power over a thousand miles isn't cost-competitive. Both the infrastructure cost and the transmission losses scale with the distance, making the cost quadratic with the transmission distance. On top of that, it multiplies your costs for the generation, because if you're not going to use storage you need enough generation in Region A to power both Region A and Region B when it's a still night in Region B, but you also need that much in Region B for when it's still in Region A. Even if that only happens one night out of five.
There are also national security implications. For all but a small handful of countries "1000 miles away" is in another country. Who does Israel connect its grid to? Or Japan? Does Germany enjoy buying power from France? What do you do when your neighbor raises the price?
Then everyone, including the bigger countries, takes on a large-scale dependency. Lose the long-distance transmission lines and the brownouts aren't just regional, it's the whole continent. There are ways to harden against that but then we're raising the cost even more.
Unlikely. I think the consensus is that the globe was already warming, humanity may have just sped it up.
Unclear why you believe nuclear energy (by which I assume you mean nuclear power generation) is relevant.
Previous articles about this dome have used terms like "radioactive contamination" or "fallout-contaminated soil" instead, which does not have the connotations of nuclear reactor programs. I suppose those terms don't "pop" as well in headlines.
On the other hand, given the wrong incentives, you might just stow nuclear waste where it's cheapest and where you can get away with it, and then not be penalized when the containment mechanism you cheaped out on fails... or maybe you just conveniently forget to do maintenance on it as the responsibility for doing maintenance somehow conveniently evaporates due to some bureaucracy.
I think the debate isn't over whether or not nuclear power itself is safe, it's the debate over whether or not humans under capitalism are to be trusted to behave responsibly with this technology. Nuclear power isn't just the technology in isolation... humans are an intrinsic part of it.
Jeffrey Sachs has commented that the socialist nations had “some of the worst environmental problems in the entire globe.”. Companies can be held to account (failure to do so is another story) but try that with a centrally run enterprise.
I also think that you are right that some of the systems surrounding nuclear energy are suboptimally managed in places (and are often intransparent for the public, which I think is one of the factors why people are still afraid). And I think it's because nuclear power generation is a social commitment on a very long time scale - and humans aren't very good at dealing with cause and effect over long time scales.
While there is, just like in aeronautics, a paper trail connecting to each engineer and expert working on a system, it does not matter whether society can identify a person that is responsible for a decision made half a century ago. Think about leaky permanent[0] waste storage close to densely populated areas (like in Germany). Analyzing what went wrong is suddenly a task for historians, not for engineers. And history is of course necessarily colored in perspective - politicans can point to an expert who was wrong half a century ago.
In engineering and safety culture, iteration is necessary to approach an optimal system - the problem is here: How can we learn from what happened decades ago when the cause wasn't a part, a design or a process, something that can be simulated with a high degree of confidence? But a decision necessarily based on lots of unknowns? What can we do to be able to learn from it next time?
[0] officially temporary but due to how it was done effectively permanent
Edit: Markup
The answer is that you design systems with multiple levels of redundancy, and then monitor them.
That way in order for something bad to happen, four independent things have to go wrong at once. Then you monitor if any of them ever fails. If one does, the other three prevent any catastrophe while you correct it. Then you have a new data point about how to design things better going forward.
I know as engineers we want to turn everything into an engineering problem but sometimes there are just humans who don't understand the severity of their actions to cut costs or defer maintenance or something and I don't know if it's possible to ever fully engineer these people away or engineer away their influence or engineer away their incentive to do the wrong thing... as much as I'd love to do that.
Maybe I'm just being a naysayer. The thing is that I still believe nuclear power is the best interim solution in existence and that it's necessary to build more nuclear plants. I just don't buy the "totally safe" argument. It's like chemo or amphotericin or something. It'd be great to not have to use it... buuuuut....
But nothing about nuclear is unique in that regard. If you have incompetence then we get Deepwater Horizon, Bophal, companies dumping cadmium, lead, mercury, cyanide, nitrogen, phosphorous or acid in to rivers and groundwater, mining runoff, destroying rainforest, dam failures, basically the entire list of Superfund sites in the US. Those kinds of things can be significantly worse than even a full scale nuclear meltdown. And on top of that, chemical pollutants have no half-life -- they're forever.
There is a 3700 acre coal mine fire that has been burning in Pennsylvania since 1962, causing the town to be abandoned:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire
It's the same problem with anything -- even solar is silicon. Take a look a the environmental history of Silicon Valley for a morbid lesson in how wrong that can go.
Edit: With the nuclear plant I at least have feasible means to monitor any danger by myself.
Or maybe "safe" isn't the right term for something that also produces some of the most deadly substances that we know of? It's "safe" so long as nothing goes wrong, and everything is stored correctly. Of course, that regularly proves to not be the case: https://www.newsweek.com/ohio-school-closed-enriched-uranium...
Yes, I will take the waste. If it's in the containers we've developed specifically for this purpose, yes. It beats the current situation in the US where everyone stores waste on site because politicians can't decide where to put it because of people like you.
Modern waste, with proper precautions, is safe for long term disposal and storage. I cannot stress this enough.
If you don't believe me, this website has plenty of information regarding nuclear power, straight from the source. It is developed and run by the UN. Based on your misinformation, I strongly urge you to pore over this content and then attempt to reevaluate your own question.
There is nothing more sad out there than linking to a homepage the nuclear lobby uses to drive this artificial nuclear hype we've seen here in the last months.
There is nothing more sad...
I can think of two things:
1. A lack of second order thinking.
2. Dead puppies.
It says /a lot/ about the truthiness of it, actually
Could you enlighten me as to who would be a more reliable source on nuclear technology?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Nuclear_University
http://www.world-nuclear.org/our-association/what-we-do/worl...
https://www.iaea.org/services/technical-cooperation-programm...
Would an organization evidently so deeply ingrained with and tied to the UN and the UN's nuclear-specific arm, backed by numerous experts, really be in the business of misleading anyone? Would you disregard a pro-climate change website for its pro-climate change bias as well?
If you still don't believe me, feel free to drop your email and I can setup a time for you to meet several physicists or engineers in the NYC area for lunch, for an educational session free of charge.
> If you still don't believe me, feel free to drop your email and I can setup a time for you to meet several physicists or engineers in the NYC area for lunch, for an educational session free of charge.
Oh please...what are the chances that the person is even close to the NCY area...? I'm from Germany. You know...the country with no nuclear issues at all anymore...besides with the waste of it of course.
Nuclear power is safe "with proper precautions", I completely agree. The problem is that it hasn't even been a week since we've proven proper precautions are not being taken.
https://www.newsweek.com/ohio-school-closed-enriched-uranium...
And anti-nuclear sentiment isn't something new, don't pretend like it's some kind of worrying trend.
Assuming the alternative (which you conveniently left out) is the negative externalities of coal-fired power ending up on my doorstep? Yes, I'll take the nuke waste, thanks. Pull around on the left side of the house, please, so that you don't crush the sewer lines.
Don't worry, it's the safest kind of energy there is.
Nothing in your comment contradicts that statement.