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“This Is Catastrophic” – Thousands Of Gallons Of Radioactive Waste Leak At Nuclear Site
“This Is Catastrophic” – Thousands Of Gallons Of Radioactive Waste Leak At Nuclear Site
The ongoing radioactive leak problems at the Hanford Site, a nuclear storage tank in Washington State, are nothing new.
We first wrote about the ongoing radioative leakage at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, created as part of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, in 2013.
As a reminder, during the Cold War, the project was expanded to include nine nuclear reactors and five large plutonium processing complexes, which produced plutonium for most of the 60,000 weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Alas, the site has been leaking ever since, as many of the early safety procedures and waste disposal practices were inadequate and Hanford’s operations released significant amounts of radioactive materials into the air and the neighboring Columbia River.
Hanford’s weapons production reactors were decommissioned at the end of the Cold War, but the decades of manufacturing left behind 53 million US gallons of high-level radioactive waste, an additional 25 million cubic feet of solid radioactive waste, 200 square miles of contaminated groundwater beneath the site and occasional discoveries of undocumented contaminations.
The Hanford site represents two-thirds of the nation’s high-level radioactive waste by volume. Today, Hanford is the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States and is the focus of the nation’s largest environmental cleanup. The government spends $2 billion each year on Hanford cleanup — one-third of its entire budget for nuclear cleanup nationally. The cleanup is expected to last decades.
However, as Krugman would say, the government was not spending nearly enough, and after a major documented leak in 2013, over the weekend, thousands of gallons of radioactive waste are estimated to have leaked from the Site once again, triggering an alarm and causing one former worker to label it as “catastrophic.”
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Disaster waiting to happen’: ‘Dustbin ship’ with 25 tons of nuclear waste heading to Australia
Disaster waiting to happen’: ‘Dustbin ship’ with 25 tons of nuclear waste heading to Australia
A ship carrying 25 tons of nuclear waste has departed from France bound for Australia, despite environmentalists sounding the alarm. The critics say the ‘dustbin ship’ is not fit to carry hazardous cargo.
The BBC Shanghai departed this week from the port of Cherbourg in northern France with a load of nuclear waste. It originated at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) and had been shipped in the 1990s and early 2000s to France for reprocessing. Now the plant in Beaumont-Hague near Cherbourg is sending it back to Australia’s Port Kembla, south of Sydney, to be eventually stored at the Lucas Heights nuclear facility, on the outskirts of the Australia’s largest city.
But some environmentalists and legislators believe the vessel should not be used to handle the hazardous cargo at all and objected to its selection by the French nuclear firm Areva. They believe the 14-year-old ship with the waste on board would be a sort of floating Fukushima – unable to withstand a serious emergency.
“Areva, almost bankrupt, are using a dustbin ship to carry waste, without any serious inspection!” Denis Baupin, a senior lawmaker with the French Green Party, tweeted.
“It’s outrageous that the BBC Shanghai is heading towards Australia and it is not outfitted to safely carry nuclear waste,”said Emma Gibson, head of program for Greenpeace Australia Pacific.
“What we have is a vessel that will be ill-equipped to deal with any sort of accident involving the nuclear waste. It’s an environmental disaster waiting to happen.”
She added that the vessel owned by German firm BBC Chartering was “blacklisted by the United States because of its safety record.”
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The World’s Never Seen Anything Like This
The World’s Never Seen Anything Like This
The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant No. 2 nuclear reactor fuel is missing from the core containment vessel. (Source: Up to 100% of No. 2 Reactor Fuel May Have Melted, NHK World News, Sept. 25, 2015.)
Where did it go? Nobody knows.
Not only that but the “learning curve” for a nuclear meltdown is as fresh as the event itself because “the world has never seen anything like this,” never.
Utilizing cosmic ray muon radiography with nuclear emulsion, researchers from Nagoya University peered inside the reactors at Fukushima. The nuclear fuel in reactor core No. 5 was clearly visible via the muon process. However, at No. 2 reactor, which released a very large amount of radioactive substances coincident with the 2011 explosion, little, if any, signs of nuclear fuel appear in the containment vessel. A serious meltdown is underway.
“The researchers say further analyses are needed to determine whether molten fuel penetrated the reactor and fell down,” Ibid. In short, researchers do not yet know if the molten hot stuff has penetrated the steel/concrete base beyond the containment vessel, thus entering Mother Earth.
The Nagoya University research team, in coordination with Toshiba Corporation, reported their findings at a meeting of the Physical Society of Japan on Sept. 26th.
Thus, therefore, and furthermore, it is advisable to review what’s at stake:
“High-level nuclear waste is almost unimaginably poisonous. Take for example cesium-137, with a half-life of 30 years, which makes up the largest fraction of long-lived radionuclides residing in spent nuclear fuel. One gram of radioactive cesium-137 (about half the size of a dime) contains 88 Curies of radioactivity. 104 Curies of radioactive cesium-137, spread evenly over one square mile of land, will make it uninhabitable for more than a century,” Comments on Draft of Nuclear Waste Administration Act of 2013, Physicians for Social Responsibility, May 23, 2013.
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