Hanford unprepared for another radioactive tank waste leak, says federal audit
tri-cityherald.com
tri-cityherald.com
Years ago they had to install special ventilation around some takes due to the contents producing flammable gases.
In hindsight, of course, it's not surprising that even the double-walled tanks face issues with corrosion. Vitrification is the best process they've been able to come up with, but that's not a fast thing to do.
In 2018 an "experiment" at PNNL reported that "Dangerous radioactive waste has been trapped inside solid glass in a first-of-its-kind demonstration". Only time will tell how real that prospect is.
https://www.livescience.com/62623-radioactive-waste-trapped-...
> A DOE study finished in January 2019 found that 24 single-shell tanks were being infiltrated with 12 to 1,000 gallons each annually, the IG audit report said.
> The water makes it difficult to determine if the level of waste in the tanks is dropping, which could indicate more active leaks.
I can see why old, giant tanks of waste might have trouble keeping stuff from leaking out. But why is it hard to keep water from getting in?
If it's really just an issue of decades old structures out and exposed to the elements letting rainwater in ... can an auxiliary structure with a roof not be added?
The tanks mentioned in this article are containing stuff that, frankly, nobody knows exactly what it is or how to dispose of it.
Modern nuclear reactors have been designed and built with your concerns in mind for at least 40 years. All the "modern" operating reactors have no known end of life. They also emit less radiation than a coal plant. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
...seeing as $MY_AGE+40 is smaller than $HUMAN_LIFE_EXPECTANCY, this does exceedingly little to reassure me. Taking my progeny into consideration tips the scales even further away from being reassured.
> no known end of life
Quite literally all that means is we haven't tested them enough to know when they'll break a priori, and instead we'll just have to deal with the consequences when they inevitably do.
> They also emit less radiation than a coal plant.
That's not taking into account everything we don't know about how they'll hold up as time ticks on. It's equivalent to me saying "this newfangled browser engine I just made is much safer than chomium, look at how few CVE's it has!"
Unlike software, people actually take engineering projects, especially those that risk public health, very seriously.
Of course every aspect of these systems, in whole and in part, have been tested exhaustively.
There are a number of things that can be proven about nuclear power plants. Millions of man hours have gone into their research and design. They are rigorously monitored and controlled. Their emissions in every form is highly regulated. If one is within 3 decades of failure, we'd know it. When engineers and scientists say that there isn't a single power plant that is going to fail in the next 40 years. It's not a guess.
> If one is within 3 decades of failure, we'd know it
> When engineers and scientists say that there isn't a single power plant that is going to fail in the next 40 years. It's not a guess.
Why didn't we know it about Fukushima? Things happen beyond the control of man, to make claims like the above is impossible.
It's become a case study and spawned new audit and safeguard procedures.
I'm not going to guarantee that nuclear is the safest power source until the end of time. But at present, it is, actually. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
The problems there aren't due to the normal radioactive waste produced in nuclear power plants, rather it's due to the various materials used in weapons production and general nuclear research being mixed together in waste tanks.
While the waste from operating nuclear power plants certainly isn't minimal, these days we can at least store it safely. Of course, as Fukushima showed, us, there have been very bad assumptions made about the types of disasters nuclear power plants might face.
Did the folks creating the containers in the article believe themselves to be creating unsafe storage? I doubt it. Our current situation is no different. We think it's safe because we haven't seen it break, when we do see it break it will be in an unexpected way, probably ahead of the time we thought it'd break.
80 years later, we know a lot more, and have a different set of expectations for how to store and handle nuclear waste.
It's fair to be skeptical, but not fair to condemn them based on past mistakes which have been specifically addressed. It would be like saying modern cars must be unsafe, because cars from the 1940s don't have seatbelts or airbags. It doesn't follow.
You could also say "well, we know about some safety issues, but what about the ones we don't know about yet?" but that attitude extends to all of science and engineering as well. We have to proceed with caution, but proceed nonetheless.
It's absolutely insane to me that people on this site can be so distrustful of government when it comes to things like privacy/encryption/etc, and so trustful for things like continuing to provide funding for maintenance of nuclear facilities, especially given current governments have proven themselves undeserving of trust in either regard.
Thus, for known radioactive isotope composites we can conclude which isotopes will be prevalent in which timeframe, and how much and which radioactive radiation will be emitted.
As such it is possible to conclusively state how much radiation danger for living entities (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_(unit)) will be emitted over a certain time frame.
Since the composition of nuclear waste is usually known or verifiable, and applying the known decay chains, it is possible to derive the duration and amount of risk.
I trust e.g. climate change and the scientists behind it; but their basis is, statistically, much weaker than the statistics and science behind nuclear decay (which is much easier to measure and to verify).
Also, geologists are - if trusted - also able to predict the permeability of the composition of the underground over a given period. They are able to (to the best of our knowledge) deduce the age of sediments >40k years into the past.
Imagine (widespread deployment) of storage sites that have to last 100.000 years.