Six tanks at Hanford nuclear site in Washington are leaking | Hacker News Reader

Six tanks at Hanford nuclear site in Washington are leaking

cbsnews.com

63 pointsstfu44 comments

This is a boondoggle. Its important to clean it up but the situation has been exploited by lax oversite and sloppy administration. When I first read about the Hanford cleanup plant, saw the expense, and saw how much had been done, I immediately thought "Hmmm, I wonder what program the CIA is funding here."

While I realize it sounds a bit tin-hatish (ok a lot tin hat like) the "standard" way to launder money in the government budget is to create an important but remote project, and pour money into it. Nobody in Congress is going to say "We need to cut funding to cleaning up this site." and also more importantly there really isn't any real penalty for it not getting done. So it becomes a foil for some other "off budget" activities. Local politicians do this too, we had a county supervisor who effectively embezzled money by convincing the county to pay too much for park maintenance. That excess was being funneled back to them as a sort of kickback.

Anyway, the 'simple' plan of building new tanks and moving waste from the old set to the new set isn't being done. And most of what is there isn't being identified anyway so it is hard to say what constraints there are on the solutions. Not well managed at all sadly.

Fun anecdote: about a decade ago I spent some time at the National Lab that's right next door to this site. They made you wear dosimeters at all times, even if you weren't anywhere near the nuke stuff. If it was your first time, they gave you a guidebook to what all the alarms, sirens, klaxons and bells meant and what to do if you heard them.

Things like, "a high pitched alarm with a bell is a fire alarm, evacuate the building to a designated evacuation point and wait"

or "a siren with no flashing strobes means that you should move quickly to a designated decontamination area and begin decontamination procedures"

the one that that everybody thought was both scary and fun "if you hear 'the howler', run"

no indication of direction or location to meet, just...scatter to the four winds

nobody asked under what conditions you might hear this "howler"

I had an internship at Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory almost two years ago; we got similar directions related to alarms, klaxons, etc. They had two kind of alarms. A ringing bell meant basically "there's a fire, leave the building". The other one was a high-pitched alarm that meant "something bad (likely nuclear) is going on, find a nearest building (or stay in it if you're already there), close all windows, shut down air conditioning and wait".

Another funny anecdote from that place: one day we got an e-mail related to some power problems we experienced earlier. The message suggested to avoid using some part of the parking lot near the transformers, as there was a slight chance that an explosion could eject the doors of the transformer station.

Four winds? Unless you have other indications (direction of boom, light flash, mushroom cloud), go upwind. If upwind is an obviously bad idea, orthogonal to the wind may be better than downwind, especially if you cannot move fast.

So what do you do when it changes direction. Keep it simple, just get away as fast and far away as possible.

Look at the graph in http://www.epa.gov/radiation/docs/er/planning-guidance-for-r..., pages 29, 31, and 32. You can be well outside the 'minimal damage' zone, but inside the 'dangerous fallout' zone for miles.

For an extreme non-nuclear example, read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaprun_disaster#The_disaster: "12 passengers from the rear of the train who successfully broke a window followed the advice of another escaped passenger who had been a volunteer fire fighter for 20 years, and travelled downward past the fire and below the smoke."

You may be hosed either way, but choices you make can have huge effects on your chances.

Every time someone comments in favor of the safety of nuclear energy, I point to incidents like this. Totally manageable. Totally mis-managed -- or, unmanaged.

Sure, maybe technically we know what to do. (Although I find this debatable on the timescales involved.)

But the human factor -- especially at any significant timescale (even just a few decades, or even years, or even in current time and practice). Zero reliability.

Humans have not demonstrated any capacity to properly and reliably manage technology requiring such levels of commitment and diligence.

P.S. This is one reason that corporations should pay significant taxes. Because they should directly bear a significant portion of the costs of such fuck ups, and the preventive mitigation of them (e.g. effective regulation). In order for this to happen, they need to be contributing while they are extant and are making money from the endeavors. If we don't do this, society ends up chasing a non-corporeal ghost after the fact, or even when corporeal, one that no longer has any financial motive to pay. Eventually, the cost ends up being dumped indirectly and indiscriminately upon the general public. And often, the worst of the costs (e.g. health issues) end up being dumped upon those least advantaged and most defenseless.

Maybe its a British thing, but I'm very amused by the phrase "nuclear reservation". Cant wait for the Chernobyl Country Park or the Fukushima Fun Zone. Love the way soft cuddly words are connected to "evil" words in a tragically predictable attempt to gloss over things.

It fits how we use the word reservation in the west. This was also hanford's name I think when they constructed the site during WII as part of the manhattan project.

US may be, but reservation in the UK means nature, pretty birds, and not treading on wild flowers. Weird people wearing bobble hats and walking boots armed with binoculars sneak through ticking off things they have seen in little reference books. (Note we in the UK don't shoot them, nature or the weird people). Certainly not some scary nuclear thing at all. In dear old Blighty we call such places: "scary nuclear places".

Well in America the word Reservation was used for land set aside for Native tribes long before the idea of a "nature' reserve ever sprang up. That's why we typically use refuge for what you would call a reservation.

The only reason the word reservation has a positive connotation to you is because of what it colloquially refers to in your country. It's base definition is really anything that's been reserved for a specific purpose, doesn't have to be for wildlife preservation.

I doubt whoever named this facility back during WWII-era was attempting to soften up the image of it. Given that it was part of the Manhattan Project they probably didn't even think the general public would be aware of it.

Plenty of nature and pretty birds--the need to secure Hanford kept the area undeveloped.

Thank you for the best contribution to the Campaign for Plain English on HN.

I hope to soon see 6 lane stuck-in-traffic-ways, online adultery sites, and one joyous day I will be called a passenger on a train again instead of a customer :-)

I meant western United States, I'm sorry for being American centric. Really, the definition of reservation is quite simple: an area reserved for something. It's not a national park (though hanford reach is a monument I believe). Given the lack of people on the reservation, the area is quite natural.

I dunno. Reservation seems very unemotional and bureaucratic, very disconnected from any soft and cuddly words. Nature reserves are land that has been set aside for nature purposes, Indian reservations are land set aside for the Native Americans, and nuclear reservation are land set aside for nuclear purposes. When you phone ahead to a restaurant/hotel/car rental agency and make a reservation, a table/room/car has been set aside for you.

Do you use a different word in the UK for these situations?

In US english, the meaning is more subtle. Reservations are also where we put things we don't want (like native americans).

Cant wait for the Chernobyl Country Park

Actually, the Red Forest in Pripyat is a place where many people can't wait to go. The exclusion zone has created a very interesting nature reserve.

Environmentalist and nuclear proponent James Lovelock (of "Gaia hypothesis" fame) has proposed distributing nuclear waste throughout wilderness areas to avoid concentrating the effect, but also to scare away developers:

"Stick it in some precious wilderness. If you wanted to preserve the biodiversity of rainforest, drop pockets of nuclear waste into it to keep the developers out. The lifespans of the wild things might be shortened a bit, but the animals wouldn't know, or care. Natural selection would take care of the mutations. Life would go on."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/sep/16/scienceandnature...

If you really want to read some cool things about Hanford, check out the DOE's cleanup page, and the IEER reports about cleaning up the "canyons".

And remember that they built those now-leaking tanks in the 1940's and '50's. There's also some great accident reports about the "accountability" tanks at Sellafield.

http://www.google.com/search?q=ieer+hanford

http://www.hanford.gov

http://www.wiseinternational.org/node/2558

Great reminder that nuclear waste represents a multi decade, even multi century/millenium challenge in some cases. This makes me very wary of a federal government with no plans for dealing with the piling up waste now that yucca mtn (an admittedly problematic project) has been cancelled. The feds are raising money for this but will it be enougb? Of course not!

I'm sorry, but CBS is just ridiculous. Why did that article need to be spread over ten pages? The splits are even in the middle of sentences.

"Why did that article need to be spread over ten pages?"

ads and reportedly Google Panda rewards these tricks (theory is that by clicking on many pages instead of one means you like the sites)

Google makes hundreds of small changes every day. The specific impact of any large and widely reported update is probably overwhelmed very quickly by the little changes. Specific manipulations of Google don't typically survive long.

But it is possible CBS has a very naive "SEO expert" suggesting something like that.

Sounds like an official Google statement. The reality, however, is different.

I base it on the panic-filled threads I see in places like Warrior Forum and Blackhat World every time Google changes something.

What they do is totally different from this, they usually engage in very black hat tactics.

They see it reduces bounce rate...... but not away from that actual article.

Such a silly trick.

I lived in West Richland as a small kid while my dad was working at Hanford. I hope they can fix this, it's a very nice area (sage brush, scrub, the snake and Columbia rivers)...

My in-laws are generational Hanford-ites: the grandparents built it, the grandkids are cleaning it up. If anyone ever goes up there, there is a FASCINATING jet-boat tour you can take up the Hanford river where they show you about 6 or 7 of the reactors. The tour driver knows all about the history of these fission plants, and he tells it during the 2 hour tour.

Highly recommended, fascinating, and a great merging of bird watching and nuclear history.

There are also a limited number of public site tours each year, focusing on the B Reactor. (The first full scale fission reactor in the world.)

http://manhattanprojectbreactor.hanford.gov/

I've gone twice and it is really fascinating. You get to stand about twenty feet from the face of the reactor core, walk around the control room, etc. I have some pictures and video I can share if anyone is interested, although I'm sure some Googling can turn up lots of them as well.

One of my favorite anecdotes is that the valve covers for all the cooling pipes are open and have to remain that way so that the Russian inspectors can verify each year that there is no evidence that the reactor has been in operation. (Not sure if these inspections are actually still happening.)

Also for arms control purposes, there is an open pit elsewhere on the site where decommissioned US Navy reactors are stored. (Russia can monitor the number and position of them via satellite.)

I would be interseted to hear which US/Russian treaty involved verification of plutonium production reactors or naval reactors. I'm not aware of any such.

(There are plans for a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty, but discussion has on that has been indefinitely stalled in the Conference on Disarmament by Pakistan).

I had to do some Googling, but the PPRA treaty would appear to explain the valve cover inspections: http://dtirp.dtra.mil/tic/synopses/ppra.aspx

Still looking for what would apply to the Navy reactors.

That's great to read, thanks! I imagine the experience earned on verifying the PPRA will be valuable when a verification mechanism for the FMCT is designed.

Well, I haven't found a specific treaty or agreement covering the Naval reactors. It may be a less formal arrangement, I don't know.

But a did find a nice picture of the reactor pit: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-jYVl__lRp5s/Tfpf4Cyi6rI/AAAAAAAAA6...

Here a link about a related article from more than a year ago about the same site: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3479972

Seems like the warning from this article come true and the site starts polluting the environment. What a mess.

Starts?

For anyone that's not heard of Hanford before do look up its significant history.

Speaking out of turn I've probably met an anti corrosion engineer that might have worked there as part of team looking at issues to do with long term storage and after a few drinks there might have been a lot of head shaking. [1]

[1] http://nuclearsecrecy.com/blog/2011/12/09/friday-image-the-h...

The Seattle Times has slightly different content, including the Oregon senator saying he will extract a promise from the incoming Sec. of Energy (and probably more funding) for this

http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2020415477_hanfordlea...

Keep in mind Hanford is on the border, close enough for Oregon to care.

Yes. The Columbia and it's wildlife are part of the economic base of the area. Salmon are still a really big thing here and there is plenty of political pressure to protect them.

But also Ron Wyden is on the senate energy committee, so this is directly in his pervue as well.

If you'll let me ramble a sec: it's hard to feel positive about our congress as a whole, but I've been impressed by Oregon's delegation over the last few years. Wyden and Blumenauer have impressed me as well informed and articulate. Wyden in particular is one of the few members of congress with an accurate understanding of privacy and intellectual property concerns on the internet.

$2 Billion a year! All the good that could do, sigh.

Cleaning up the mess is a good thing, and easily worth $2 billion a year.

Of course, it could have cost a lot less if they had started properly 20 years ago.

Or 40 years ago. It's been messed up for a long time.

Now, yes. Absolutely agree. Pretty sure that was ultimately the blokes point.

Tangent... This though is the problem with the "democratic" process changing governments every 4 (whatever) years, leading to no real long term policies, and no motivation to even care. This is why the Chinese will dominate the future. They can do long, very long, term planning. We "democratic" westerners need to sort this ASAP. Some how we need a way to make it worth politicians think long term. We in the UK are soon to run in to a massive power problems, which really should have been planned for 20 odd years ago too. No one did anything, and building power plants tends to take a while. And given the soon to come panic, we'll be paying top dollar for these things to be built as we will be over a barrel, while also paying over the odds to make up for the energy short fall. Heh, I bet Iran gets a new nuclear power station before we do.

Another tangent... Perhaps its time we the people properly took matters in to our own hands and got on with micro power generation and using less power. Work towards energy self reliance.

Sorry, that had noting to do with this discussion... Oh well. Got to ramble somewhere :)

Jeez, they're still leaking? I wrote about this place for a high school class in '82... Had nightmares for weeks afterward.

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