Organic Cat Litter Chief Suspect In Nuclear Waste Accident | Hacker News Reader

Organic Cat Litter Chief Suspect In Nuclear Waste Accident

npr.org

147 pointstimr52 comments

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God I read that title wrong.

I read it as

"Organic Cat Litter Chief" - "Suspect in Nuclear Waste Accident"

As opposed to

"Organic Cat Litter" - "Chief Suspect in Nuclear Waste Accident"

I kept wondering when the CEO of a Cat Litter company was going to be blamed for something.

> Organic Cat Litter Chief

A new Tzar appointment by the President.

It's not you, that's how I read it.

"I misread X as Y" comments don't seem to be popular here, but I was tempted to post the same thing.

I read this headline exactly the same way as you, and I actually felt relieved to know that the cat litter CEO was not a suspect in this accident!

I think it's a lesson for headline writers: Sure, write your headline as terse and tight as you can make it. But at least re-read it a few times to make sure it isn't ambiguous.

Another way to put it: "What would Experts Exchange think of this headline?"

That's exactly how I read it the first time, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence

(I also misinterpreted it at first glance)

People laugh at the extreme detail the military uses to specify such item. I spent six years in USAF and I've groaned at some of it. But we damn sure never had this happen under SAC. And we were building nukes. Details matter.

The SAC had plenty of nasty screw ups, including littering large areas of Spain and (iirc) Greenland with plutonium dust from nuclear weapons accidents. It's also pretty much dumb luck that we've never had an accidental detonation of an SAC-controlled nuclear weapon:

http://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Eric-Schlosser-ebook/d...

Here's some more information about the plutonium dust in Spain - there was a mid-air collision between a KC tanker and a B-52 which was carrying nuclear weapons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash

I very strongly recommend that book to anyone who hasn't read it yet - fascinating stuff.

Yeah, we had amazing accodents until they finally decided to stop flying them drop-ready. Bombing Franco's farmers was a major impetus towards that. But the lack of accidental detonation was not luck; they were crazy overbuilt.

If you read the book, you might change your mind about that. It spends a lot of time documenting some really basic deficiencies -- bombs that could detonate if overheated or struck by a single projectile, for example. A large number of weapons were made with high explosives that weren't thermostable. Others could detonate if dropped from a few feet. There were many deployed ballistic missiles that were susceptible to lightning strikes. The arming switches in SAC aircraft were, for years, simple open-loop circuits that had a high probability of short-circuiting in an accident.

In fact, most of the book is about the attempts of the weapons labs to make the arsenal safer. Most of those attempts were rebuffed by the military. The SAC's strict policies definitely helped to prevent disaster, but if you read about some of the incidents, it's clear that there was a lot of stupid luck involved, too.

Most of those would probably cause a non nuclear detonation. Still bad, but no where near as dangerous.

The author deals with this line of reasoning and finds it wanting.

Take my comment with a grain of salt, as I have not read the book, but there is no story if there is no danger.

If the author concluded that there was no nuclear danger, its likely the book has little more than academic interest, and doesn't get published. You can both be correct and want to sell books but commercial considerations can also direct rhetoric.

British strategic nuclear weapon designs used mechanical safeguards, including thousands of steel ball bearings poured in through a hole in the casing, which made the bomb safe to carry but had to be drained out before use [1].

BLUE PEACOCK, however, used chickens [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_Club#Design_features

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Peacock#Chicken_power

The chicken wasn't a safety feature; it was to keep the warhead's electronics warm for a few days when buried in the ground so it would still work when needed.

UK nukes used to use bicycle locks:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7097101.stm

"The Bomb is actually armed by inserting a bicycle lock key into the arming switch and turning it through 90 degrees. There is no code which needs to be entered or dual key system to prevent a rogue individual from arming the Bomb."

NB To this day the crews of UK Trident submarines can launch their weapons on their own without requiring any codes to be transmitted to activate the weapons.

"To this day the crews of UK Trident submarines can launch their weapons on their own without requiring any codes to be transmitted to activate the weapons."

Isn't this also the case with US Trident submarines? That is, codes transmitted to the vessel are used to authenticate launch instructions, not to enable the missiles to be armed. Otherwise the submarine would be unable to launch in the event that land-based communications systems were destroyed.

As far as I know, only the UK Tridents have this interesting arrangement. This link on Permissive Action Links suggests that US Trident submarines need to receive codes to unlock safes before they can launch:

"Instead of another party confirming a missile launch as in the case of land-based ICBMs, the set of keys is distributed among the key personnel on the submarine and are kept in safes (each of these crew members has access only to his keys), some of which are locked by combination locks. Nobody on board has the combination to open these safes - the unlock key comes as a part of the launch order from the higher authority."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_Action_Link

So they could theoretically drill/destroy/crack the safe in the case of an emergency where codes could not be transmitted.

That is why British submarines have letters of last resort, to be opened and followed if there are no communications.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort

The joke was that that made the missiles the world's safest - the key would inevitably be lost immediately, and it would take 3 weeks and 12 forms to requisition a pair of bolt cutters.

The use of chickens to warm the electronics was a proposal. It seems clear that it was never actually implemented. Nice story though!

The entire weapon never reached active status IIRC, so it's moot anyway.

That's nice, but they will make mistakes anyway. As an example look at exploding NASA space rockets (I suppose NASA is not military, but it's an example where they also used a meticulous process and still failed).

How is this possible?

To take a random example I'm familiar with, making small modifications outside certain small bounds requires a lot of paperwork and approval. This can be something as simple as adding a tow hook to an airplane known to be good for towing. If you're lucky and the modification has been done before and somebody went through the trouble of getting the modification certified, you can take advantage of the work they've already done, greatly reducing the trouble involved as long as you can get permission from whoever got it certified. If you're doing something totally new (or something other people have done, but nobody got it certified for general use) then you have to file a form describing what you're going to do, get it approved, do the work, get the result inspected....

All this even for small aircraft where you'd be very hard-pressed to use them to kill more than two people (including the pilot) even if for some reason you had a goal of maximizing deaths.

Yet, when handling nuclear waste, apparently people can just randomly decide to completely change an important component used in the process?

Or was the change studied and approved by an engineer, but the problem was missed? The article certainly doesn't make it sound like this happened, but it could be an omission.

Bad instructions. Basicly someone said use brand X without specifying what about X you needed. So, someone used brand X with a different formula and never thought you needed to get approval because there was no change.

It still seems completely crazy that someone would write instructions that way in the first place. Surely you'd specify at least something about the composition as well?

I once talked to a scientist who worked on cat litter for a major corporation. It was surprisingly interesting to hear about the chemistry and geology and supply chain management of such a mundane substance. I guess the DOE scientists running this project were not aware of these subtle issues of chemistry and geology.

Isn't organic cat litter made from corn?

They were in the business of manufacturing non-organic cat litter, the kind made from a special type of clay.

The clay is not that special, it is called bentonite. You can order it by the pallet load, and it is a whole lot cheaper than cat litter. I'm surprised that the spec did not call for bentonite directly, and that no one in these comments has mentioned it either.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bentonite

Why the hell they are writing a spec with a commercial product name rather than the material contained in it is beyond me. If the contractor knew they were looking for a certain kind of clay rather than cat litter, this would be nearly impossible.

The problem seems to be that they didn't know exactly what they looking for, or how to describe the set of acceptable clay-like substances.

This is an physical-science example of the "justification problem" -- chemistry isn't computer science, we don't design all out components from the elemental level; we discover and hack molecules, and identify them by interpreting their behaviors (boiling point, what color smoke is produced when mixed with some other stuff, etc) , and then we slap on a label that we hope is correct). It's all a very statistical science, not irrefutable logic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regress_argument

how to describe the set of acceptable clay-like substances.

Given the context, I would have hoped something involving a mass spectrometer or something similar rather than buying something purely on the basis that it is known to have the property of being suitable for cats to urinate into and then hoping that they don't ever change the mixture on any products in the range.

I bet the thinking was something along the lines of "kitty litter is an inert absorptive material", and nobody really thought much about the differences between types of kitty litter, and whether or not they were truly inert.

You realize that you've just described the way 99% of software engineering works in the real world, right?

Easy for me to play armchair manager after the fact, but it really sounds like they need to just supply the barrels and the "cat litter" to their clients. No spec, no shopping, no confusion, no substitutions, fewer humans and organizations in the loop, etc.

Even so with the stakes this high they should not just trust a contractor. They should also be doing constant (not random spot check) testing at the point of use.

I think this is still speculative though.

From what I understand from local papers it is also believed a piece of salt fell from the ceiling (waste is housed in an old salt mine).

That's old information. This story is the current theory.

Oh. Do they have any evidence against the salt fall theory? My understanding is that no one has been back down the hole since the event.

They've been inside the room that had the leak, and they have video of the ruptured drum. There were no problems with the mine walls, and the evidence suggests the damage was heat-related:

http://www.wipp.energy.gov/wipprecovery/photo_video.html

You are much more up to date than I am.

Thanks for the cool link. Interesting read.

Hilarious - you can't make this stuff up. I thought we were told that organic == better. I can just see it happening:

Vendor: "For an extra 95 cents per pound I can get it in Organic".

DoE Supply Clerk smiles and thinks of cute kittens. :)

The strangest thing about this is that the organic cat litters are quite a bit more expensive than clay. So it wasn't done to save money. What the reason possibly could have been I cannot fathom.

Perhaps the brand they had been using switched to organic?

I suppose it's also possible that someone just assumed organic == better, or there were both organic and non-organic versions of the same cat litter, and a mix-up resulted when the premium product came up first in their search results.

If they'd known what the litter would be used for, I would hope they'd have been more careful, but I don't know at what level in the supply chain the decision to switch was made.

Bags get mixed up.

Anyone else have a disturbing "Brawndo has got what plants crave" moment?

"How come nobody caught this and raised a red flag?" asks

It looks like they caught it to me.

There's pretty clearly an implicit "before something exploded" on that question.

Catching it after it takes the entire facility out of commission doesn't really count as catching it, does it?

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