Author: Richard Denton, MD
Disclaimer: I am a medical doctor and will concentrate on the medical aspects. I have no conflict of interest as some nuclear physicists might who are paid by the nuclear industry.
Radiation is one of the six crises that this Platform addresses; each one could annihilate civilization as we know it. Radiation could do so in either an acute or chronic manner. The acute effects would come from a major accident, miscalculation, or terrorist attack or an actual nuclear war. The chronic effects are killing by inducing cancers and other medical conditions.
Radiation exposure is of course related to the other five global threat scenarios. Radiation is interconnected as part of a nuclear war that would immediately kill millions from radiation. A nuclear bomb is not just a bigger better bomb but emits radiation that kills locally and at a distance over time. Because of its power, it would put dust and smoke into the stratosphere that would cause a decrease of the sun’s penetration. A “nuclear winter” would result, causing death of millions by famine. Some people suggest that nuclear power is “green” —even the answer to climate change. But nuclear power plants could be a target of terrorists using cyberwarfare or crashing an airliner into a reactor.
Radiation is like Yin and Yang. It has detrimental effects—causing cancers, etc. — but also beneficial effects, as in helping make diagnoses through X-rays and nuclear imaging and also in treating cancers. Ionizing radiation has the ability to break apart molecules like DNA. There are different types of ionizing radiation: alpha and beta are weak energy but potent if taken internally, while X-rays and gamma radiation have strong energy and can kill acutely people as well as cancers, or can be used externally in diagnosis.
There are several principles that apply to radiation in humans. Radiation accumulates in the body and acts over time. Even small doses of radiation can become significant if one is exposed to them all the time. Radiation comes from several sources: background (about one to three milliSieverts, although it can be higher in specific regions) that affects us all, such as from the sun, or the ground such as radon gas that is the number two cause of lung cancer in Canada. We are also exposed individually when we get an X-ray or fly in an airplane.
If a food source that has been contaminated with radiation is eaten, it is absorbed by the organism that devours it. Thus, radiation is concentrated up the food chain. We humans are at the top of the food chain. We thus concentrate radiation over time.
People vary in their susceptibility, with fetuses being the most vulnerable, then children and women.
Radiation affects rapidly dividing cells and these are the dividing quickly in fetuses and children. Timing is important. Just as Fetal Alcohol Syndrome occurs when alcohol is ingested at the time an embryo is developing, and cannabis may affect the developing brain of people younger than twenty five, radiation acts similarly on different age groups, inducing miscarriages, mutagenesis, or teratogenesis.
Radiation also affects specific organs, depending on the radioactive substance that is absorbed. Iodine 131 affects the thyroid, whereas strontium 90 is analogous to calcium and is taken up by bone and thus affects the bone marrow and blood.
Some people believe in a hypothesis called homesis that says that small doses of radiation may be beneficial in causing mutations that will stimulate the immune system and that some mutations may improve our species. This is held by very few non-medical people. As medical doctors, we believe that there is a linear graph such that even small amounts of radiation over time can be harmful. We should try to minimize our exposure.
Safety limits are designed by people and are dependent more on politics, to prevent panic of the masses as opposed to being based on science. Limits of radiation vary from country to country and even in local municipalities. It is set to vary, depending on the job that one does. It is allowed for workers in nuclear plants to receive up to 100 mSv. (MilliSeverts) per year, while the limit for the general population is ten mSv.
Here are the effects of acute radiation on humans: The effects vary with the size of the dose — amount of exposure to the radiation. With 50-100 mSv (milliSieverts), there are changes in blood chemistry. At 500 mSv, one develops nausea, and then fatigue, followed by vomiting at 700 mSv., followed by hair loss and then diarrhoea over the following 2-3 weeks, as the most rapidly dividing cells are affected first. At 1000 mSv. you start bleeding. At 4,000 mSv, there may be death in 2-3 months. At 10,000 mSv., there is death within 1-2 weeks with destruction of the intestinal system and bleeding. At 20,000 mSv., the neurologic system is affected resulting in loss of consciousness, and death within hours to a few days.
Here are the effects of chronic radiation on humans: miscarriages; mutagenic (changes in the genetic material, usually DNA but also RNA, leading to mutations such as Down’s syndrome), teratogenic (which disturbs the development of a fetus, resulting in congenital malformations that can be passed down to future generations); cancers such as leukaemia, thyroid, breast, brain, pancreas; hardening of the arteries, leading to strokes and heart attacks; cataracts; kidney damage; and acceleration of the overall ageing process.
We also have a gradation of severity of nuclear accidents; The International Nuclear Event Scale (INES) rates the severity of accidents on a logarithmic scale from 1 to 7 with 7 being the worst; a major accident; (Chernobyl April 1986, and Fukushima March 2011). A level 6 serious accident was the Kyshtym disaster at the Mayak Chemical Combine in the Soviet Union in September 1957 at a nuclear waste reprocessing plant. Level 5, accidents with wider consequences, include Windscale fire at Sellafield on October 1957 in the United Kingdom, which caused a fire with graphite and uranium in a military air cooled reactor; the Three Mile Island on March 1979 nuclear power plant; Chalk River, December 1952, when the reactor core was damaged; and the Goiânia accident in Brazil in 1987 when a caesium chloride radiation source was taken from an abandoned hospital.
Please see also the following paper, which expands on the above summary:
How to Post a Comment
After you have read the comments of other readers (scroll down to see them), you can respond by clicking the “reply” option under one of them. We’ll let him know that you have replied, so he can answer you and carry on as long a discussion as you like.
You can also post your own ideas in the comment space below – or share an article you have read elsewhere by copying it and pasting it into the comment space, which is visible in a pale font.
Other readers will not see your email address, but please provide it so we can notify you if someone replies to your comment, so you can respond.
When you post a comment, please give it a title; then select it and click the “B” (for “boldface”). You can also italicize passages (with the “I”), indent, add hyperlinks (with the chain symbol) or attach a photo or graphic from your hard drive by clicking the paperclip at the right side of the space. Have fun with it!
We produce several one-hour-long Zoom conversations each week about various aspects of six issues we address. You can watch them live and send a question to the speakers or watch the edited version later here or on our Youtube channel.
https://quillette.com/2023/02/09/the-dawn-of-nuclear-energy-abundance/
This is a solidly pro nuclear energy article with many interesting points, although the failings of nuclear power are also addressed.
The primary argument here is that renewables will not be sufficient for baseload capacity even with better storage; with the alternative to nuclear as base load being natural gas. There’s a useful segment about how long it takes for nuclear power plants to be built (“France constructed 56 reactors from 1974 to 1989, the fastest decarbonization in history. South Korea built each of the six reactors at the Hanul nuclear plant in five to six years. Hanul, which is one of the largest nuclear plants in the world, generates as much power as 4,300 US land-based wind turbines.”)
Also a few paragraphs on SMRs, waste, etc.
The repeated reference to “the free world” in the later section will irk some (Russia and China are the unfree world.)
Give it a read and list your contrary arguments. I’d be interested in reading them.
“Dirty Bombs” are very much in the news, with Russia claiming that Ukraine is planning to detonate one, and Ukraine making counter claims. Dirty Bombs involve deliberate radioactive contamination of an area to render it uninhabitable and force its evacuation. There are many recent articles on this including one from CBC https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/russia-ukraine-dirty-bomb-1.6628794 and from The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/25/russia-to-raise-ukraine-dirty-bomb-claim-at-un-security-council
Excellent article about Hanford from the Guardian – Nuclear Waste Ravaged Their Land – The Yakama Nation is on a Quest to Rescue It. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/20/yakama-nation-nuclear-waste-cleanup?utm_source=AM+Nukes+Roundup&utm_campaign=4ee4ef2a20-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_07_25_12_19_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_547ee518ec-4ee4ef2a20-391829837
Zaporizhzhia: Real Risk of Nuclear Disaster in Ukraine – Watchdog
George Wright | BBC News | 7 August 2022
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62449982
“The UN’s nuclear watchdog has called for an immediate end to any military action near Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, warning of a “very real risk of a nuclear disaster”.
IAEA chief Rafael Mariano Grossi said he was “extremely concerned” by reports of shelling at Europe’s largest nuclear power plant.
It comes as Ukraine said parts of the facility were “seriously damaged” by Russian military strikes.
Russia seized the plant in March.
It has kept its Ukrainian employees, but Kyiv accuses Russian forces of firing rockets at civilian areas from the site, employing “terror tactics”.
Friday’s strikes underline “the very real risk of a nuclear disaster that could threaten public health and the environment in Ukraine and beyond”, Mr Grossi said in a statement.
“Any military firepower directed at or from the facility would amount to playing with fire, with potentially catastrophic consequences,” he added.
Ukrainian staff must be able to carry out their important duties “without threats or pressure”, he said, adding that the IAEA should be allowed to provide technical support.
“For the sake of protecting people in Ukraine and elsewhere from a potential nuclear accident, we must all set aside our differences and act, now. The IAEA is ready,” said Mr Grossi, days after stating the plant was “completely out of control”.
The operator of the Zaporizhzhia plant said the Russian missile strikes had forced the closure of one “power unit”, adding that there was a risk of radioactive leaks.
The strikes “caused a serious risk for the safe operation of the plant”, operator Enerhoatom wrote on Telegram.
Moscow said Ukraine carried out the attack.
The BBC was unable to verify the reported damage at the nuclear plant.
However, the EU has hit out at Moscow over the latest shelling with the bloc’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, saying it “condemns Russia’s military activities” around the plant.
“This is a serious and irresponsible breach of nuclear safety rules and another example of Russia’s disregard for international norms,” he said, and called for the IAEA to be granted access to the plant.
Russian forces hold the plant and surrounding areas, close to Ukrainian-held territory. It consists of six pressurised water reactors and stores radioactive waste.
Civilians in nearby Nikopol, which lies across the river and is still under Ukrainian control, told the BBC that the Russians were firing rockets from the area around the plant and moving military hardware into the compound.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Friday that “any bombing of this site is a shameless crime, an act of terror”.
The plant is in the city of Enerhodar, in the south-east of Ukraine along the left bank of the River Dnieper (Dnipro in Ukrainian).
The UK defence ministry says Russia is using the area to launch attacks – taking advantage of the “protected status” of the nuclear power plant to reduce the risk of overnight attacks from Ukrainian forces.”
RADIOACTIVE BEASTS ARE INVADING OUR CITIES

This is excerpted from a story adapted from Animal Revolution, by Ron Broglio. The story was published in WIRED Magazine, june 22, 2022.
RADIOACTIVE WILD BOAR are invading towns in southern Germany. They take out a man in a wheelchair; they break through fences and roam the roads, shutting down highway traffic; they travel in packs scavenging for food. Police scramble to restore order in urban centers. The radioactive boar are armed with a postapocalyptic payload; they live in the wake of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. By foraging on radioactive plants, the animals embody the return of a disaster many seek to repress. Following the collapse and meltdown of a reactor at Chernobyl, more than 100,000 people were evacuated from the 20-mile Exclusion Zone around the nuclear power plant. Residents exposed to the radiation suffered from radiation poisoning, leukemia, and thyroid cancer. Estimates are that some 4,000 people could die from illnesses related to the accident.
Fires in Irradiated Zones are Bad Too
The animals are a danger but probably more dangerous are the forest fires in Belarus and other regions where Chernobyl fall-out still contaminates the plant life. When fires occur, the smoke contains radioactivity, which falls again in new spots.
WATCH OUT FOR THE BLUEBERRIES
Kate Brown tells in her book Manual for Survival: An Environmental History of the Chernobyl Disaster that she went out to the woods in Belarus and picked blueberries along with lots of people who were picking them to sell. They take them to a truck that is buying them to ship into the EU. There’s a geiger counter or something, and if a batch is too “hot,” they dilute them by mixing them in with non-irradiated berries. Be careful where your berries come from.
UN Nuclear Watchdog Is ‘Gravely Concerned’ About Ukraine Plant Held by Russia
Stephanie Liechtenstein | PassBlue | 3 May 2022
VIENNA — The International Atomic Energy Agency expressed “grave concern” recently about the safety at Ukraine’s largest nuclear power plant, in Zaporizhzhia, and said that the situation for the Ukrainian personnel working there was “unsustainable.”
The plant was captured by Russian forces in a dramatic assault on March 4. Ever since then, Ukrainian staff continue to manage the daily business at the plant, but eight nuclear experts from Russia’s own Rosenergoatom company, a unit of the Russian state nuclear firm Rosatom, are also present at the plant.
The IAEA director-general, Rafael Grossi, said on April 29 that the United Nations agency was informed by Kyiv that the Ukrainian staffers at Zaporizhzhia were “working under unbelievable pressure,” being monitored constantly by the Rosatom experts, who demanded daily reports from plant management about “confidential issues” on the functioning of the plant.
Read more
“The IAEA considers that the presence of Rosatom senior technical staff could lead to interference with the normal lines of operational command or authority, and potential frictions when it comes to decision-making,” the IAEA said in a report published on Friday.
Grossi told reporters that he discussed the situation at the Zaporizhzhia plant with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on April 26, during a personal meeting in Kyiv. [Update, May 4: Grossi tweeted that he had met with the head of Rosatom and other senior Russian officials in Istanbul, and stressed the “urgency of ensuring” the safety of the plant]
“Clearly, the situation in and around Zaporizhzhia is not only a matter of nuclear safety, security and safeguards, it is a matter of profound political implications,” Grossi said at the media briefing.
“What I can tell you at this point is that our consultations continue first and foremost with Ukraine but also with Russia,” Grossi added. “In a few days, I will be seeing also my Russian counterparts and will continue this discussion.” He did not specify the exact date or location of the potential meeting, but it is understood that Grossi will try to negotiate access for the IAEA to the Zaporizhzhia plant.
Grossi held a meeting with senior Russian officials on April 1, including with the Rosatom Director General Alexey Likhachev, where they began discussions on ensuring nuclear safety in Ukraine. The meeting was held in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, which is squeezed between Poland and Lithuania.
While Ukraine assured the UN agency that the integrity of the plant’s six reactors had not been affected and that no radioactive material had been released, Grossi said that he was working hard on visiting Zaporizhzhia because his IAEA specialists “need to see the functionality of the safety equipment” and to check “whether there has been an impact on the physical protection of material” as a result of the Russian attack in March.
The IAEA is also worried about the power supply of the plant, given that two of its four power lines were damaged and lost during the Russian assault.
Edwin Lyman, the director of nuclear power safety at the Washington-based Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit group, told PassBlue that if Grossi succeeds in arranging a visit to Zaporizhzhia, IAEA inspectors “would have a long checklist, from walking down the plant to inspect damage and the state of repair, including electrical systems that are a particular concern, to looking at how programs for radiation monitoring and protection of personnel are being carried out.”
Lyman also said that “the human element is a key factor in nuclear plant safety,” referring to the importance of checking on the Ukrainian staff and their morale.
Zaporizhzhia is Europe’s largest nuclear power station, located in southeast Ukraine, part of the region where civilians from the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol were recently evacuated by a joint mission of the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross. Although the city is still in Ukrainian hands, the nuclear facility was captured by Russian forces on March 4, after intense shelling throughout the night that destroyed a training center situated just a few hundred meters away from the plant’s six reactors, as well as a laboratory building, another administrative building and two high-voltage lines that provide power supply to the plant. Some partial damage was apparently also inflicted on two of the six reactors.
The attack sent shock waves across the rest of Europe, raising fears of a global catastrophe similar to the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.
It even led President Zelensky to issue a stark warning in the early hours of March 4, saying that “a catastrophe ten times worse than Chernobyl may happen. This will be the end of all Europe.”
Lyman told PassBlue: “When I heard that a fire broke out at the plant, without knowing exactly where it was, I was very concerned because fire is potentially one of the most dangerous things to occur at a nuclear plant and has a high risk of causing a meltdown if it disables electrical systems. Fortunately, the fire was confined to administrative buildings, but it was a close call.”
Situation in Chernobyl under control
Grossi also briefed reporters in Vienna on April 29 about his mission earlier in the week to Ukraine, which included a visit to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and exclusion zone, a 30-kilometer (19-mile) radius surrounding the site of the reactor disaster. During the mission, IAEA nuclear experts delivered vital equipment that Ukraine had requested.
The specialists also reinstalled an antenna to reconnect the remote monitoring abilities that had been disrupted for two months as a result of the Russian takeover of the site on Feb. 24.
Grossi said that the agency was now “getting back the information” that it needed to monitor the nuclear material still present at the site as well as other activities. The data are received by satellites on the rooftop of the UN headquarters building in Vienna.
Furthermore, while visiting the Chernobyl site, IAEA specialists measured the radiation level at a specific area inside the exclusion zone, where Russian forces had been digging fortifications and trenches, a task during which the soldiers may have been exposed to radiation.
Grossi said, however, that while his experts did measure an increase in the radiation level there, this was still “significantly below the authorized levels for workers in an environment with this type of radiation.”
The Chernobyl site, which is located in northern Ukraine, near the border with Belarus, is no longer a working nuclear power plant, but the reactor that was destroyed in the 1986 disaster requires constant management and monitoring by staff to ensure that no additional nuclear material is released.
Russia seized the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on the first day of its invasion of Ukraine, as Russian tanks rolled across the border from Belarus firing on the plant, then surrounding it and detaining the Ukrainian guards in the site’s basement. At the same time, the troops allowed the Ukrainian technicians and engineers to continue to run the facility under the Russians’ watch.
The Ukrainian staff were not allowed to leave the site while the Russian forces occupied it and were not allowed to rotate, which subjected them to a lot of stress, leading Grossi to say that this could have “potentially adverse consequences for safety.” On March 31, the Russian troops withdrew from the plant.
The IAEA said that the situation is back under control but that more work is needed to return the site to normalcy. This work will be done within the next few weeks.
Risks of missiles going astray
Grossi also said on April 29 that if reports about missiles flying over the South Ukraine nuclear power plant, a third site, located in Mikolaiv province, around 350 kilometres (220 miles) south of Kyiv, are confirmed, this will be “extremely serious.”
“Had such a missile gone astray, it could have had a severe impact on the physical integrity of the plant, potentially leading to a nuclear accident,” he said.
The situation in Ukraine is unprecedented for being the first time that a war is taking place amid all four nuclear power plants across the country. A major nuclear accident could have widespread consequences far beyond the borders of Ukraine.
Speaking about the risk of a nuclear accident, Lyman told PassBlue that it “is higher than it should be because Russia continues to ignore the entreaties of Ukraine and the IAEA to respect the integrity of its nuclear facilities and refrain from putting them in danger from military bombardment.”
Read More: https://www.passblue.com/2022/05/03/un-nuclear-watchdog-is-gravely-concerned-about-ukraine-plant-held-by-russia/
A Big Pile of PU: 120 Tons of Plutonium is Legacy of Britain’s Dirty Decades of Reprocessing
By Paul Brown, The Energy Mix [as reprinted by Beyond Nuclear International]
https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2022/02/06/a-big-pile-of-pu/
Seventy years after the United Kingdom first began extracting plutonium from spent uranium fuel to make nuclear weapons, the industry is finally calling a halt to reprocessing, leaving the country with 120 tons of the metal, the biggest stockpile in the world. However, the government has no idea what to do with it.
Having spent hundreds of billions of pounds producing plutonium in a series of plants at Sellafield in the Lake District, the UK policy is to store it indefinitely—or until it can come up with a better idea. There is also 90,000 tons of less dangerous depleted uranium in warehouses in the UK, also without an end use.
Plans to use plutonium in fast breeder reactors and then mixed with uranium as a fuel for existing fission reactors have long ago been abandoned as too expensive, unworkable, or sometimes both. Even burning plutonium as a fuel, while technically possible, is very costly.
The closing of the last reprocessing plant, as with all nuclear endeavours, does not mean the end of the industry, in fact it will take at least another century to dismantle the many buildings and clean up the waste. In the meantime, it is costing £3 billion a year to keep the site safe.
Perhaps one of the strangest aspects of this story to outside observers is that, apart from a minority of anti-nuclear campaigners, this plutonium factory in one of prettiest parts of England hardly ever gets discussed or mentioned by the UK’s two main political parties. Neither has ever objected to what seems on paper to be a colossal waste of money.
Read more
The secret of this silence is that the parliamentary seats in the Lake District are all politically on a knife-edge. No candidate for either Conservative or Labour can afford to be anti-nuclear, otherwise the seat would certainly go to the opposition party.
The story of Sellafield matters, however, particularly to countries like Japan, which is poised to open its own reprocessing works at Rokkasho, Aomori in September. Strangely, too, this is one of Japan’s most scenic areas.
This plan is particularly controversial in a country that is the only one so far to have had nuclear bombs used against it. Like Britain, Japan has no obvious outlet for the plutonium it will produce, except nuclear weapons and fast breeder reactors, this last a technology Japan has already tried and has ended in failure. It also seems unnecessary because Japan already owns a plutonium stockpile of several tonnes from sending spent fuel to the UK to be reprocessed.
While there is much more opposition in Japan, including from the influential New Diplomacy Initiative, there is local support for the works because politicians see employment opportunities. But there is also international concern about the potential spread of nuclear weapon capability to Japan and beyond.
In Britain, reprocessing began in 1952 entirely as a military endeavour. The idea was to make hydrogen bombs so Britain could keep up with the United States and Russia in the nuclear arms race.
A much larger plant opened in 1964, and it is this one that is finally due to close this year. It had a nominal capacity to reprocess 1,500 tonnes of spent fuel a year for both military and civilian purposes. It reprocessed fuel from the UK’s 26 Magnox, Italy’s Latina, and Japan’s Tokai Magnox nuclear reactors. It has reprocessed 45,000 tonnes so far and has 318 more to go.
From its inception, the reprocessing works was a highly polluting plant, discharging contaminated water into the Irish Sea. Plutonium, cesium, and other radionuclides were sent out to sea in a mile-long pipeline. Radioactivity was picked up in shellfish in Ireland, Norway, and Denmark, and in local seafood that had to be tested regularly to see if the radioactive load they carried made them too dangerous to eat. Local people were advised to keep their consumption of shellfish low. These discharges have now been considerably cleaned up.
A third “recycling” project, the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP), was planned in 1977, expected to capitalize on the then projected expansion of nuclear power and to provide plutonium and uranium for newer reactors, and for the still-hoped-for fast breeder reactor programme. Government approval was given nine years later, by which time contracts for reprocessing had been made with a number of foreign companies. The new plant’s biggest customer was Japan.
So in the end, reprocessing became a commercial venture rather than producing anything useful. Nine countries sent spent fuel to Sellafield to have plutonium and uranium extracted for reuse and paid a great deal of money to do so. In reality, very little of either metal has ever been used because mixed oxide fuels were too expensive, and fast breeder reactors could never be scaled up sufficiently to be economic.
The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), the UK government body now charged with keeping Sellafield safe and ultimately dismantling it, still makes £820 million (US$1.16 billion) a year storing spent fuel, plutonium, uranium, and nuclear waste for foreign governments and the UK’s Ministry of Defence. This latter waste includes the radioactive material from powering nuclear submarines and manufacturing bombs and warheads. The rest of the £3.345 billion (US$4.570) budget comes from the UK taxpayer.
In its current plan, the NDA hopes to have disposed of all spent fuel by 2125—103 years hence. All buildings will be demolished or reused by 2133.
Although these targets seem a long way off, some of the interim ones are already unlikely. The documents say the NDA hopes to establish a deep depository for high-level waste by 2040—but the UK government has been looking for a site since 1980, and every one “found” has so far been rejected. It has just started the search all over again, offering lots of financial incentives to local communities to consider the idea.
Whatever happens, one thing is certain—most of the 11,000 people currently employed at Sellafield will still have jobs for decades to come.
Paul Brown is a former environmental writer for The Guardian and one of the founders of Climate News Network, now incorporated into The Energy Mix. @pbrown4348. This article first appeared on The Energy Mix and is available for republication through the commons.
Former heads of US, German, and French nuclear regulation and
Secretary to UK government’s radiation protection committee:
“Nuclear is just not part of any feasible strategy
that could counter climate change.”
—————————————–
Dr. Gregory Jaczko,
former Chairman of the
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
—————————————–
Prof. Wolfgang Renneberg,
former Head of
Reactor Safety, Radiation Protection and Nuclear Waste,
Federal Environment Ministry, Germany.
—————————————–
Dr. Bernard Laponche,
former Director General,
French Agency for Energy Management,
former Advisor to French Minister of Environment, Energy and Nuclear Safety.
—————————————–
Dr. Paul Dorfman,
former Secretary of the UK Government
Committee Examining Radiation Risk from Internal Emitters.(CERRIE)
—————————————–
The climate is running hot. Evolving knowledge of climate sensitivity and polar ice melt-rate makes clear that sea-level rise is ramping, along with destructive storm, storm surge, severe precipitation and flooding, not forgetting wildfire. With mounting concern and recognition over the speed and pace of the low carbon energy transition that’s needed, nuclear has been reframed as a partial response to the threat of global heating. But at the heart of this are questions about whether nuclear could help with the climate crisis, whether nuclear is economically viable, what are the consequences of nuclear accidents, what to do with the waste, and whether there’s a place for nuclear within the swiftly expanding renewable energy evolution.
As key experts who have worked on the front-line of the nuclear issue, we’ve all involved at the highest governmental nuclear regulatory and radiation protection levels in the US, Germany, France and UK. In this context, we consider it our collective responsibility to comment on the main issue: Whether nuclear could play a significant role as a strategy against climate change.
The central message, repeated again and again, that a new generation of nuclear will be clean, safe, smart and cheap, is fiction. The reality is nuclear is neither clean, safe or smart; but a very complex technology with the potential to cause significant harm. Nuclear isn’t cheap, but extremely costly. Perhaps most importantly nuclear is just not part of any feasible strategy that could counter climate change. To make a relevant contribution to global power generation, up to more than ten thousand new reactors would be required, depending on reactor design.
In short, nuclear as strategy against climate change is:
• Too costly in absolute terms to make a relevant contribution to global power production
• More expensive than renewable energy in terms of energy production and CO2 mitigation, even taking into account costs of grid management tools like energy storage associated with renewables roll-out.
• Too costly and risky for financial market investment, and therefore dependent on very large public subsidies and loan guarantees.
• Unsustainable due to the unresolved problem of very long-lived radioactive waste.
• Financially unsustainable as no economic institution is prepared to insure against the full potential cost, environmental and human impacts of accidental radiation release – with the majority of those very significant costs being borne by the public.
• Militarily hazardous since newly promoted reactor designs increase the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation.
• Inherently risky due to unavoidable cascading accidents from human error, internal faults, and external impacts; vulnerability to climate-driven sea-level rise, storm, storm surge, inundation and flooding hazard, resulting in international economic impacts.
• Subject to too many unresolved technical and safety problems associated with newer unproven concepts, including ‘Advanced’ and Small Modular Reactors (SMRs).
• Too unwieldy and complex to create an efficient industrial regime for reactor construction and operation processes within the intended build-time and scope needed for climate change mitigation.
• Unlikely to make a relevant contribution to necessary climate change mitigation needed by the 2030’s due to nuclear’s impracticably lengthy development and construction time-lines, and the overwhelming construction costs of the very great volume of reactors that would be needed to make a difference.
06.01.2022.
Posted by the Nuclear Consulting Group, http://www.nuclearconsult.com .
for more info on the above: kitchissippiottawacocchapter@gmail.com (Ann Pohl, contact person)
MARK YOUR CALENDARS:
Wednesday, January 12th at 7 pm Eastern
Nuclear Waste Watch (NWW) is planning a webinar
This educational event will help all of us get prepared for the release of the federal government’s draft radioactive / nuclear waste management policy, which is anticipated any time after New Year’s.
Here is a link to a backgrounder that will help prep anyone to these issues. https://kovcouncil.files.wordpress.com/2021/12/7000-gens-nuclear-waste-backgrounder-document-1.pdf
We also encourage anyone with time in the next few weeks to visit http://www.nuclearwastewatch.ca and click on the Radioactive Waste Policy Review tab at the top. Through this, you can review all that was covered in the Feb to May 2021 public engagement process with Natural Resources Canada (NRCan). Also have a look at the “What we said” report that NWW — our mentors and leads on all these issues — submitted to NRCan in September, in response to the feds’ first two engagement reports.
Some of you may be aware that there is a simultaneous “strategies” process being led by the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), on contract with the federal government. Our chapter, like many other organizations involved on this issue, chose not to be involved in NWMO’s process as they are industry-led, and we feel that development of strategies ought to come after a good public policy is in place. Hopefully we will soon learn from Natural Resources Canada how we can review and comment on the outcomes from NWMO’s process.
I will send out more details about accessing NWW’s January 12th “Review and Restart” webinar as I get them. I hope everyone receiving this has a wonderful relaxing and re-energizing break and a great start into 2022.
I see nothing convincing in this presentation, nothing quantitative. Anecdotal. I’m a nuclear physicist, professor , having used nuclear accelerators, and worked at a reactor for years. This whole presentation is mostly propaganda/grossly alarmist. How many people have died, gotten severe sickness from being near nuclear reactors? Give some real numbers compared to other energy sources and dangers. What about using radioactive sources in hospitals. How many tons of fish have been affected. Just talk!! You have lost me! Not progressive! The dangers of nuclear war are real, but discussion about nuclear radiation here is largely ignorant, not to say stupid. Do people realize the natural sources of radiation and through the evoluion of life?
Jellyfish Attack Nuclear Power Plant. Again.
Susan D’Agostino | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists | 28 October 2021
“Scotland’s only working nuclear power plant at Torness shut down in an emergency procedure this week when jellyfish clogged the sea water-cooling intake pipes at the plant, according to the Scotland Herald. Without access to cool water, a nuclear power plant risks overheating, with potentially disastrous results (see: Fukushima). The intake pipes can also be damaged, which disrupts power generation. And ocean life that gets sucked into a power plant’s intake pipes risks death.
The threat these gelatinous, pulsating, umbrella-shaped marine animals pose to nuclear power plants is neither new nor unknown. (Indeed, the Bulletin reported on this threat in 2015.) Nuclear power plant closures—even temporary ones—are expensive. To protect marine life and avert power plant closures, scientists are exploring early warning system options. For example, researchers at Cranfield University in the United Kingdom launched a project earlier this year to determine whether drones may be used to provide estimates of jellyfish locations, amounts, and density.
Read more
“The successful operation of [beyond visual line of sight drones] will enable us to detect threats from marine ingress at an earlier state and prevent disruption to the power plant,” Monica Rivas Casado, a senior lecturer in environmental monitoring at Cranfield, said. In the United Kingdom, 20 percent of electricity is nuclear, a percentage roughly equaled in the United States, compared with approximately 10 percent globally.
Blooms of translucent jellyfish with their trailing, stinging tentacles are sometimes described as “invasions” because they often emerge en masse in way that appears sudden. Still, determined observers may find early clues of a jellyfish bloom. Spotting jellyfish swarms by way of drones requires balancing recognition accuracy with recognition speed—at least if the goal is to take preventative action to avoid nuclear power plant disruption. Scientists have been at work developing algorithms that foster this balance, including one study that delivered results within a desirable timeframe and over 90 percent accuracy.
In another early-detection effort, scientists have investigated the potential for acoustic characteristics of these sea creatures to detect their numbers, density, and threat level. The creatures’ underwater undulations create sounds—known as “echo energy” or “acoustic scatterings”—that give them away, as long as humans are willing to listen.
The clash between gelatinous jellyfish and hulking nuclear power plants has a long history. These spineless, brainless, bloodless creatures shut down the Torness nuclear power plant in 2011 at a cost of approximately $1.5 million per day, according to one estimate. Swarms of these invertebrates have also been responsible for nuclear power plant shutdowns in Israel, Japan, the United States, the Philippines, South Korea, and Sweden.
Humans have unwittingly nurtured the adversarial relationship between jellyfish and nuclear power plants. That is, human-induced climate change has raised ocean water temperatures, setting conditions for larger-than-usual jellyfish populations. Further, the relatively warm water near nuclear power plant discharge outlets may attract jellyfish swarms, according to one study. Also, pollution has lowered oxygen levels in sea water, which jellyfish tolerate more than other marine animals, leading to their proliferation.
Some look at jellyfish and see elegant ballerinas of the sea, while others view them as pests. Either way, they are nothing if not resilient. Jellyfish are 95 percent water, drift in topical waters and the Arctic Ocean, and thrive in the ocean’s bottom as well as on its surface. Nuclear power plant operators might take note: Older-than-dinosaur jellyfish are likely here to stay.
Link: https://thebulletin.org/2021/10/jellyfish-attack-nuclear-power-plant-again
The History of Nuclear Power’s Imagined Future: Plutonium’s Journey from Asset to Waste
William Walker | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists | 7 September 2021
Two histories of nuclear power can be recounted. The first is the history of the active present. It tells, amongst other things, of the technology’s evolution and role in electricity production, its military connections, installed types, capacities and performance of reactors, their fuelling and spent fuel discharges, their accidents, the supplying, operating and regulating institutions, and the involvement of states. The second is the history of the imagined future. It tells of how, at particular moments, nuclear power and much connected with it have been imagined playing out in years, decades, and even centuries ahead.
Plutonium’s history, of each kind, and its legacies are the subject of a recent book by Frank von Hippel, Masafumi Takubo and Jungmin Kang. It is an impressive study of technological struggle and ultimate failure, and of plutonium’s journey from regard as a vital energy asset to an eternally troublesome waste.
Read more
Toward heaven or hell? The conflict over plutonium’s future
The book opens with the discovery of plutonium in the early 1940s and the precipitous development of its related technologies—weapons and production systems—during the World War and ensuing Cold War. Its future civilian role was only glimpsed early on. This changed in the 1960s and 1970s when the imagined future of nuclear power, with plutonium at its heart, acquired an extraordinary potency, becoming a source of serious division and conflict within societies and between states. At issue was the great expansion of nuclear electricity supply proposed by research and development labs, industries, and governments in many countries. To sustain the expansion, a transition had to be engineered, it was insisted, from uranium-fueled “thermal” reactors (mainly light-water) to plutonium-fuelled “fast-breeder” reactors, which would “breed” more fuel than they consumed, allowing societies to free themselves from constraints on uranium supply and from price inflation as demand increased. This transition required immediate, resolute, and heavy commitment of resources, starting now, to develop and demonstrate fast reactor technology and establish the industrial means (that is, reprocessing of spent fuel from thermal reactors) of providing the stocks of plutonium needed to charge up fast breeders. The year 2000 was often identified as when the “plutonium economy” had to be up and running.[2]
A future heaven of technological grandeur and deliverance from energy scarcity found itself pitted against an imagined, two-part hell: nuclear weapons proliferation, as separated plutonium became widely available from reprocessing plants that were outside inspection regimes or hard to safeguard; and eternal vulnerability to fast reactor accidents and the release of deadly radionuclides. The debate was enlivened by competing visions of energy futures (“hard” paths that emphasize large-scale, centralized production facilities versus “soft” paths that center on smaller, distributed, renewable sources), of policies towards the management of reactor fueling and discharges (once-through versus closed fuel-cycles) and of approaches to the containment and eventual disposal of radioactive wastes.
The argument over nuclear futures became an international storm when the United States—champion of civil nuclear expansionism and main provider of nuclear technologies and materials—reversed course and mounted a campaign to halt reprocessing and the development of fast breeder reactors. Spurred by oil crisis, the nuclear visions conjured by the World Energy Conference and other seemingly authoritative bodies created panic in Washington after India had used civil plutonium in its test explosion of 1974. Before me is a typical study from the period. Its central scenario anticipated that global reactor capacity of 2,550 gigawatts (GW), including 394 GW of fast reactors, would have been installed by 2020 (today’s reality is 420 GW with no fast breeders).[3] Seventeen countries would require substantial plutonium stocks and access to reprocessing by that date.
The US government’s aggressive discouragement of reprocessing and fast breeder reactor programs was fiercely criticized abroad. The Ford and then Carter administrations, backed by Congress, were accused of striving to kill the nuclear future by imposing constraints, often by extraterritorial means, on civil production, trade, and development in the nuclear sphere, and by encouraging anti-nuclear movements across the world.
In defiance, France and the UK launched ambitious programs to build large-scale reprocessing plants to supply plutonium for fast breeder reactors at home and in other Western industrial countries—notably Germany and Japan—that needed time to establish their own capabilities.[4] By the early 1980s, binding contracts and intergovernmental agreements had been signed. A circulatory system was envisaged in which spent fuels would be reprocessed in France and the UK and their products returned to the countries of origin, enabling the steady distribution of plutonium for the launch of fast reactors.
Unable to prevent this from happening, the United States shifted to a policy of, in effect, containment by gaining agreement on the reprocessing system’s scope and regulation. Being nuclear weapon states, France and the UK were granted de facto recognition as nuclear-reprocessing-states, to coin a term, with Germany and Japan, uniquely among non-nuclear weapon states, granted rights as nuclear-reprocessing-states-in-waiting. Rigorous safeguards and physical protection measures would be applied, no transfers of reprocessing technology would occur to states outside the Western alliance (and some within it, including South Korea), and the US would retain consent rights over the reprocessing of certain spent fuels delivered to France and the UK. France’s agreement to apply strict export controls, including cancellation of plans to transfer reprocessing technology to Pakistan and other “countries of concern,” and to act “as if” it were a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (France did not join until 1992) helped to calm US nerves.[5]
A binary nuclear system was thus instituted in the late 1970s and early 1980s. One entailed the “total reprocessing” of spent nuclear fuels from installed thermal reactors. It was dedicated to realization of a plutonium-fueled future, albeit restricted to a limited set of industrial countries with two nuclear-weapons-states/nuclear-reprocessing-states at its hub. The Soviet Union provided another hub in the Eastern Bloc, reprocessing spent fuels from satellite countries while keeping separated plutonium and fast breeder reactor development within the Russian heartland. The other system entailed the end of reprocessing and plutonium usage for civil purposes and the adoption of spent fuel storage and disposal as the standard, in effect creating a voluntary and involuntary community of “nuclear-non-reprocessing-states,” marshalled by the United States.
The plutonium future that so gripped the imagination and drove policy in the 1970s, for and against, soon lost credibility. Nuclear power’s expansion stalled as costs rose and accidents occurred, glut replaced scarcity in fossil fuel and uranium markets, and cheaper sources of electricity (natural gas and eventually renewables) became available. Fast breeder prototypes also performed badly, and most designs’ reliance on sodium cooling became an Achilles heel. In addition, utilities came to realise that increase in the “burn-up” of uranium fuels enabled greater amounts of energy to be extracted in situ from the fissioning of uranium-235 and plutonium, without the rigmarole of separating the latter.
Although the Reagan administration looked more kindly upon reprocessing than its predecessors, nuclear power’s downward trend and the confinement of reprocessing to a handful of allied countries allowed Washington to relax and cease campaigning to end the activity, other than in countries that sought nuclear weapons. Concern also shifted in the 1980s and 1990s from reprocessing to centrifuge enrichment of uranium, and from power programs to clandestine activity, as the likely routes to weapon acquisition.
From creation of a future to preservation of the present
Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant in Japan Aomori. Credit: Nife. (CC BY-SA 3.0). Accessed via Wikimedia Commons.
Construction of the British and French reprocessing plants at Sellafield and Cap de la Hague proceeded throughout the 1980s.[6] Their primary justification—preparing for the introduction of fast breeder reactors—had lost all credibility by the time of their completion. The German, British and French breeder programs had been cut back, soon to be abandoned, and in 1988 Germany cancelled plans to build its own bulk reprocessing plant at Wackersorf. Although Japan’s confidence in its fast breeder reactor program also waned, it was kept alive to avoid disrupting construction of the reprocessing plant at Rokkasho-mura.
Faced by the plutonium economy’s demise, reprocessing was re-purposed by its supporters to provide the industry and its governmental backers with reason not to do the obvious—abandon ship. Creating an essential future was replaced by a rationale designed to preserve and activate the newly established reprocessing infrastructures. It had two strands. A techno-economic rationale: the separation and concentration of radioactive wastes into different streams had adherent advantage, when it came to disposal, over their retention in unreprocessed spent fuel; and plutonium’s energy value could be realised through its replacement of fissile uranium in “mixed-oxide fuels” for use in existing thermal reactors (the practice of plutonium-recycling).[7] And a politico-economic rationale: The costs and risks of extrication from reprocessing commitments would exceed those of continuation, its difficulties aggravated by the political, legal, and contractual entanglements that had developed since the projects’ inception.[8]
Utilities became casualties of this shift in approach. Japanese utilities spoke of the “plutonium pressure” to which they would be subjected as plutonium extracted from their spent fuel was returned for insertion in operating thermal reactors, rather than being held in store for future fast breeder reactors. Reprocessing contracts had been entered into partly to relieve the spent fuel pressures building up at reactor sites and to avert the need to expand storage capacities there. They found themselves compelled by contractual obligation, threat of spent fuel’s return, and state-backed arm-twisting to shoulder the increasingly severe costs of reprocessing and engagement with plutonium recycling.
Thirty years after the Euro-Japanese reprocessing/recycling system’s launch, the experiment can only be judged a failure. The reasons are set out in persuasive detail in von Hippel, Takubo and Kang’s book. It is a system undergoing irreversible contraction after a long struggle, involving heavy expenditure and many troubles. Germany and the UK have already exited, the UK shutting its THORP reprocessing plant in 2018 and delaying its Magnox reprocessing plant’s closure only because of the coronavirus pandemic.[9] Instead, its Nuclear Decommissioning Authority has been given the costly (more than $138 billion) and long-lasting (more than 100 years) task of returning Sellafield and Dounreay to “green-field sites.”
Japan’s engagement with reprocessing and plutonium recycling was already deeply troubled before the Fukushima accident closed reactors: The Rokkasho-mura reprocessing plant was operating only fitfully, MOX recycling was not happening, and plutonium separated from Japanese spent fuels in France and the UK was marooned there, probably indefinitely, by inability to manage its return in MOX fuel (cutting a very long story short).[10] The declared intention to soldier on with bulk reprocessing seems increasingly bizarre and is surely unsustainable. Although there has long been speculation that Japan’s plutonium policies have been buttressed by a desire to maintain a military option, von Hippel and his colleagues attribute the stubborn commitment to reprocessing at Rokkasho-mura mainly to utilities’ dependence on the site for spent fuel storage and the matching dependence of the Aomori Prefecture, where it is located, on the income and employment attached to reprocessing.[11]
Among the involved countries, only France can claim success insofar as its reprocessing plants have kept running, and it has displayed, unlike the UK, some command of the technology of MOX fuel fabrication.[12] However, rates of plutonium separation and recycling have seldom matched, leaving growing surpluses, and results have been achieved only through heavy subsidy, higher electricity tariffs and disguise of true costs. France’s national utility EDF, saddled with enormous debts, is striving to reduce its exposure to reprocessing. It is symptomatic that no spent fuel discharged from EDF-owned and -operated reactors in the UK, including those under construction at Hinkley Point, will be reprocessed.
The Euro-Japanese reprocessing/recycling system has therefore shrunk to one country (France) serving only domestic requirements at a gradually diminishing level, and another country (Japan) pledged to persist with reprocessing and recycling but without any real activity. Contraction has become the embedded dynamic. The move away from reprocessing is being accompanied by a transition towards dry-cask storage of spent fuels. It entails their removal from water pools at reactors after a few years’ cooling and their insertion in large concrete or stainless steel containers, the former pioneered by the US and the latter by Germany.[13] The Fukushima accident in 2011 has lent urgency to this transition, long advocated by von Hippel. Many reactors were constructed in the 1960s and 1970s without large spent fuel storage, expecting that spent fuels would be routinely transported to reprocessing sites after initial cooling. “Dense-packing” of water pools became common as utilities sought to reduce reliance on reprocessing. As described in the book under review, it was only luck—a leak of water into the pool from an adjoining reactor well—that prevented a greater catastrophe at Fukushima when a spent fuel store lost its coolant.[14]
Despite Europe’s retreat from reprocessing, von Hippel, Takubo, and Kang express worry that it remains alive, with its centre moving to Asia where investment in nuclear generating capacity is strongest. Reprocessing continues in India and Russia, if fitfully, where fast reactor programmes are still being funded. Japan’s commitment remains. Although none of these programs has significant momentum, they drag on. South Korea has also long expressed a desire, against US and other foreign objection, to embark on pyroprocessing of its spent fuel, a novel technique.
There is particular concern about China’s engagement with reprocessing and its dual civil and military purposes. Its “demonstration” reprocessing plant (twin units each rated at 200 tons of heavy metal) appears to have been designed to serve two 600 MWe fast breeder reactors under construction on the coast that may, like India’s, provide weapon-grade plutonium from uranium blankets besides serving putative civil needs.[15] The military aspect of China’s reprocessing program may explain why its reporting of civilian plutonium stocks to the IAEA under the Plutonium Management Guidelines ceased in 2017, when a pilot reprocessing plant began operating. There is worry that China’s investments in reprocessing and fast reactors are serving desires to expand weapon arsenals, adding to insecurity in East Asia and strengthening Japan and South Korea’s interest in plutonium separation that China has long sought to discourage. As so often in the past, claims of civil requirement can mask military intention, increasing the importance of puncturing the myth of separated plutonium’s economic utility.
Might China become the France of the future, a country with a heavy state-backed commitment to reprocessing and a dogged defender of the separation and usage of civil plutonium? At home, perhaps, but its regional concerns will surely cause it to be circumspect in its advocacy abroad and quest for foreign contracts. Whether it can succeed technologically where others have failed, not least in overcoming the fast breeder reactor’s many difficulties, is also highly questionable.
Separated plutonium is a waste
The authors remind readers of the persistent dangers that reprocessing poses to public safety and international security: the risks of accident and exposure to radiation, the proliferation of weapons, the possibility of diversion into nuclear terrorism, and the undesirable complication of radioactive waste disposal. “In our view, it is time to ban the separation of plutonium for any purpose” (their italics) is their concluding sentence. This may be the case, but the US and other governments are unlikely to respond to their call. They have so much else to contend with—climate change, pandemics, economic distress, arms racing on a long list—leaving a ban on plutonium separation low in their priorities. They are also all too aware of past failures to institute such bans, whether in commercial or military domains, from the Carter Policy in the 1970s to the stalled Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty in the 1990s and subsequently.
Another conclusion cries out to be drawn from this book. Plutonium’s separation and usage for energy purposes was an experiment that can now decisively be pronounced a failure. Experience has shown that separated civil plutonium is a waste. The book’s first of many figures, reproduced here, is the most telling. Up to the mid-1980s, the global stock of separated plutonium was predominately military and held in warheads, peaking at around 200 tons. It now exceeds 500 tons. The increase is due to the ballooning of civil stocks as plutonium’s separation has outstripped consumption. The global stock of separated plutonium now includes material extracted from the post-Cold War dismantlement of Russian and US nuclear warheads that is also effectively a waste.[16]
Global stocks of separated plutonium[17]
The figure tells us that separated plutonium has no market clearing price. Utilities shun its usage because MOX fuel is intrinsically more expensive to manufacture, by several multiples, than uranium oxide fuels because of plutonium’s radioactivity and the consequent need for extensive shielding. This applies even when the cost of reprocessing is excluded from price calculations, as has been customary. Spent MOX fuel also contains a more toxic cocktail of radionuclides than spent uranium fuels, creating more hazards and complicating storage and disposal.
Civil plutonium is therefore not an asset, it is not “surplus to requirement;” it is a waste. This is the message that needs to be proclaimed and acknowledged, especially by governments, utilities, and industries desiring that nuclear power have a solid future and make a contribution to the avoidance of global warming. For reasons set out in von Hippel’s recent article in the Bulletin, Bill Gates is deluded in believing that the plutonium-fuelled, sodium-cooled, “Versatile Power Reactor” in which his company Terrapower is involved, has a commercial future.[18] His support is also unwelcome insofar as it helps to perpetuate the myth that plutonium is a valuable fuel, posing acceptable risks to public safety and international security. Reprocessing is a waste-producing, not an asset-creating, technology. It adds cost rather than value. It merits no future when seen in this way.
Even if all civil reprocessing ceased tomorrow, the experiment would have bequeathed the onerous task of guarding and disposing of over 300 tons of plutonium waste, and considerably more when US and Russia’s military excess is added in. Proposals come and go. Burn it in specially designed reactors? Blend it with other radioactive wastes? Bury it underground after some form of immobilization? Send it into space? All options are costly and hard to implement. Lacking ready solutions, most plutonium waste will probably remain in store above ground for decades to come, risking neglect. How to render this dangerous waste eternally safe and secure is now the question.
Disclosure
Preparation of this essay for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was suggested by Zia Mian and Frank von Hippel.
Link: https://thebulletin.org/premium/2021-09/the-history-of-nuclear-powers-imagined-future-plutoniums-journey-from-asset-to-waste
Plutonium: from Nagasaki to New Brunswick
Gordon Edwards | NB Media Co-Op | 9 August 2021
“Today, August 9, is the 76th anniversary of the US military’s atomic bombing of the City of Nagasaki in Japan. The nuclear explosive used was plutonium.
The destructive power of plutonium was first revealed on July 16, 1945, when a multicoloured mushroom cloud bloomed over the American desert – the first atomic explosion, top-secret, and much more powerful than expected. Robert Oppenheimer, the man in charge, was awestruck and thought of the words from the Bhagavad-Gita: “I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”
Three weeks and three days later, on August 9, 1945, the City of Nagasaki was destroyed with a single plutonium bomb.
Plutonium is named for Pluto, god of the dead. It is the primary nuclear explosive in the world’s nuclear arsenals. Even the largest nuclear warheads, based on nuclear fusion, require a plutonium “trigger” mechanism. Access to plutonium is key to the construction of such thermonuclear weapons. Removing the plutonium from nuclear warheads renders them impotent.
Plutonium is not found in nature but is created inside every nuclear power reactor, including the one at Point Lepreau on the Bay of Fundy. Plutonium is a human-made derivative of uranium. A metallic element heavier than uranium, it is created inside the nuclear fuel along with hundreds of lighter, fiercely radioactive by-products – the fragments of uranium atoms that have been split.
Read more
The countries that have nuclear weapons – the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (US, UK, France, Russia and China) as well as India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea – have all learned how to separate plutonium from used nuclear fuel for use in weapons. This is done by dissolving the solid fuel assemblies in a hot, highly radioactive chemical bath from which the plutonium is extracted using basic scientific procedures. Any technology for extracting plutonium from used fuel is called reprocessing.
Nuclear advocates have long dreamed of using plutonium as a reactor fuel, thereby increasing the options for new reactor designs and magnifying the longevity of the nuclear age. The problem is, once plutonium has been extracted, it can be used either for weapons or for fuel at the discretion of the country possessing it. Policing methods can be circumvented. As Edward Teller has observed: “There is no such thing as a foolproof system because the fool is always greater than the proof.”
That’s how India exploded its first atomic bomb in 1974, by using plutonium created in a Canadian research reactor given as a gift to India and a reprocessing plant provided by the US. Both the reactor and the reprocessing plant had been designated as “peaceful” facilities intended for non-military use. India declared that the bomb it had detonated was a “Peaceful Nuclear Explosive.”
After the Indian blast, it was quickly determined that several other clients of Canadian technology – South Korea, Argentina, Taiwan, and Pakistan – were also in a position to develop a plutonium-based bomb program. Swift and decisive international action forestalled those threats. In particular, South Korea and Taiwan were discouraged by their US ally from pursuing reprocessing.
Shaken by these shocking developments, in 1977 US President Jimmy Carter – the only head of state ever trained as a nuclear engineer – banned the civilian extraction of plutonium in America and tried to have reprocessing banned worldwide, because of the danger that this nuclear bomb material could fall into the hands of criminals, terrorists, or militaristic regimes bent on building their own nuclear explosive devices. As one White House adviser remarked, “We might wake up and find Washington DC gone, and not even know who did it.”
Japan is the only country without nuclear weapons that extracts plutonium from used nuclear fuel, much to the dismay of its neighbours. South Korea is not allowed to do so, despite repeated efforts by South Korea to obtain permission from the US to use a type of reprocessing technology called “pyroprocessing.” Pyroprocessing is currently undergoing experimental tests at a US nuclear laboratory in Idaho.
Now, New Brunswick has been enticed to take the plutonium plunge. The company Moltex Energy, recently established in Saint John from the UK, wants to use plutonium as a nuclear fuel in a type of reactor that is not yet fully conceptualized. The plutonium would be extracted from the thousands of solid irradiated nuclear fuel bundles currently stored at NB Power’s Point Lepreau reactor using a version of the pyroprocessing technology that South Korea has so far been denied.
On a site right beside the Bay of Fundy, the highly radioactive metallic fuel bundles would be dissolved in molten salt at a temperature of several hundred degrees. A strong electrical current would be used to strip the plutonium metal and a few other elements (less than one percent of the mass) out of the dissolved fuel.
After the government of Canada gave $50.5 million to support the Moltex project in March this year, nine retired US government advisors – all of them experts in preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons – wrote to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in May, urging him to authorize an independent review of the international implications of the proposed New Brunswick plutonium scheme.
These nine experts, who have worked under six different US presidents, both Republican and Democrat, are deeply concerned that Canada’s support for reprocessing and the civilian use of plutonium could seriously undermine delicate and precarious global non-proliferation efforts that have been underway for many decades.
No reply from the Canadian government has so far been received, although Trudeau’s office acknowledged receipt of the letter and said that the matter has been entrusted to Foreign Affairs Minister Marc Garneau and Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan.
Without any word from these two ministers, Moltex posted a response to the US experts’ letter on their corporate web site, disputing some of the claims made in the letter to Trudeau. In particular, Moltex claims that their proposed technology is not usable for nuclear weapons purposes because the plutonium is not pure, but mixed with other contaminants that cannot easily be removed.
The Moltex response has prompted another letter to Trudeau from the US non-proliferation experts, correcting this and several other misleading comments from Moltex and reiterating their call for a fully independent expert review of the non-proliferation aspects of the Moltex proposal.
Our political leaders seem oblivious to the dangers to the entire planet that could result from widespread access to plutonium. If Canada can access plutonium, so can any other country. If many countries have access to plutonium, the possession of nuclear weapons must be regarded as a real possibility. In a nuclear-armed world, any conflict anywhere can turn into a nuclear war. The stakes could not be greater.
Citizens of New Brunswick and all Canadians who realize the importance of this issue can write to our Prime Minister in support of a non-proliferation review of the Moltex proposal, and raise this matter with candidates and at the door during the next federal election campaign. We can all raise awareness of the legacy of Nagasaki and do our best to ensure that New Brunswick is not implicated by going ahead with the Moltex plutonium extraction scheme.
Link: https://nbmediacoop.org/2021/08/09/plutonium-from-nagasaki-to-new-brunswick/
Aging Hanford Tank Is Leaking Radioactive Waste Into The Ground, Feds Say
Annette Cary | Tri-City Herald | 29 April 2021
“An underground Hanford tank holding 123,000 gallons of radioactive waste appears to be leaking contaminated liquid into the ground, according to the Department of Energy.
This is the second of Hanford’s 149 single-shell tanks believed to be currently leaking waste, although in the past 67 tanks are suspected of leaking.
The most recently discovered leaker is Tank B-109, which was one of the earliest waste storage tanks built. It was constructed during World War II and received waste from Hanford site operations from 1946 to 1976.
Hanford’s 149 single-shell tanks were built to hold a mix of high-level radioactive and other hazardous chemical waste from chemically processing irradiated uranium to remove plutonium.
The Hanford site in Eastern Washington was used from WWII through the Cold War to produce about two-thirds of the plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program.”
Read more
“The Washington state Department of Ecology and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, both Hanford regulators, were notified Thursday morning that the tank was likely leaking.
“There is no increased health or safety risk to Hanford workers or the public,” the Department of Energy said in a message to Hanford site employees Thursday.
Any contamination from the leak is expected to take more than 25 years to reach the water table, which is about 210 to 240 feet below the tank.
The groundwater flows slowly over decades toward the Columbia River from central Hanford, where Tank B-109 is located.
UP TO 3,000 GALLONS LEAKED
Tank B-109 was initially observed to be leaking up to 3.5 gallons of radioactive liquid a day, but may be leaking far less on many days, according to DOE.
At a maximum it may have leaked about 3,000 gallons of waste, said Ben Harp, the deputy manager of the DOE Office of River Protection.
It appears to be leaking waste at a higher rate than the other single-shell tank that has had a leak confirmed in recent years.
In 2013 when DOE confirmed that Tank T-111 was leaking, it said liquid levels were decreasing at a rate of 150 to 300 gallons a year, or half a gallon to a gallon a day.
From the 1990s to about 2005, DOE removed as much pumpable liquid as possible from the single-shell tanks, leaving radioactive sludge and saltcake in the tanks to address concerns about leaks.
“This is one we did empty out,” Harp said of Tank B-109.
DOE estimates that the tank, which has a capacity of 530,000 gallons, has about 2,000 gallons of liquid waste sitting above the sludge and saltcake solids that it holds.
In addition, an estimated 13,000 gallons of liquids may be held up in the tank’s solid waste, similar to the way a sponge holds water, Harp said.
Tank B-109 is not one of the previously suspected leakers.
HANFORD SOIL CONTAMINATED
But it is in an area that has soil already contaminated with radioactive material.
“Contamination in this area is not a new issue and mitigation actions have been in place for decades,” DOE said in its message to Hanford employees.
The 16 underground tanks that make up the B Tank Farm had 10 assumed leaker tanks previously. They are estimated to have leaked or spilled 157,000 gallons of liquid tank waste into the soil beneath them.
In addition two adjoining Tank Farms, the BX and BY tank farms with a total of 24 single-shell tanks, are believed to have leaked or spilled about 200,000 gallons of waste in the past.
However, the largest source of contamination comes from the historic practice of disposing of radioactive liquids in trenches and tile fields. At the B, BX and BY tank farms, an estimated 51 million gallons of contaminated liquids were poured into the ground.
With some contamination already reaching groundwater in central Hanford, DOE is pumping up contaminated water and cleaning it at the Hanford 200 West Pump and Treat plant.
One of the extraction wells to pump up contaminated groundwater is near Tank B-109.
There appeared to be a drop in the level of the liquid sitting atop solid waste, but monthly checks that started in March 2019 showed the level stable until July 2020. Then another drop was detected.
The level of waste in the tanks can fluctuate as small amounts of liquid from precipitation may enter the underground tanks, liquid evaporates, and waste moves and settles.
In July 2020 a formal leak assessment was launched. It included continued monthly checks of waste levels and lowering cameras through risers, or pipes from inside the tank to the ground surface, to observe the surface of the waste.
The final step in determining that the tank likely was leaking was a meeting of a contractor technical review board on Thursday to review data and findings.
WHAT’S NEXT FOR LEAK
DOE has some possible methods to address the leak and resulting soil contamination, Harp said.
DOE has installed three ground-level plastic or asphalt barriers over areas of two tank farms to prevent rain and snow melt from carrying contamination already in the soil deeper toward groundwater.
A barrier also could be installed over the B Tank Farm.
There is a barrier installed over the T Tank Farm, which was constructed before the leak from Tank T-111 was detected.
An exhauster also was installed in Tank T-111 to help evaporate tank liquids.
Less likely is removing as much liquid waste as possible from the tank and mixing it with a concrete-like grout for disposal, possibly outside of Washington state.
Emptying the tank is possible, but would be expensive.
To date most of the waste from at least 17 of the site’s 149 single-shell tanks have been emptied into sturdier and newer double-shell tanks until the waste can be treated for disposal.
DOE is working to start glassifying some of Hanford’s liquid tank at the $17 billion vitrification plant by the end of 2023, preparing the waste for permanent disposal.
Hanford has 27 double-shell tanks after a 28th tank was emptied and taken out of service when it sprang a leak between its shells, with the waste believed to be trapped between shells as the tank was designed to do.
However, Tank B-109 is in the 200 East Area about two miles from a double-shell tank.
Infrastructure associated with the tank dates from the 1940s. Constructing piping to move the waste from Tank B-109 to a double-shell tank could cost hundreds of millions of dollars, Harp said.
Now DOE is working on emptying single-shell tanks with updated infrastructure in place.”
Link: https://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article251017489.html?
Remember the Rainbow Warrior!
“Emptying the tank is possible but would be expensive.” So where would you put it? Double-shelled tanks cost hundreds of millions of dollars. But if you put it in the ground, we know where it is going to wind up. What other options are there?
Enriched Secrecy: BWXT’s Radioactive Plans
Zach Ruiter | Trent Arthur | 13 April 2021
“The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) recently granted a ten-year licence renewal to BWXT Nuclear Energy Canada on Monaghan Road in downtown Peterborough-Nogojiwanong.
The decision to grant the licence is contentious because it allows BWXT to spew toxic radioactive uranium particles into the water and disperse them in the air across the street from Prince of Wales Elementary School.
BWXT is the new owner and operator of what was General Electric-Hitachi Canada, the nuclear operation of the General Electric factory known for poisoning generations of workers and families in addition to contaminating the Little Lake and Otonabee River system with numerous toxic chemicals.
The added pollution will come from relocating their current uranium pelleting factory from Toronto to Peterborough-Nogojiwanong.”
Read more
Pelleting is the cooking of natural uranium fuel powder, at 1650 degrees centigrade, to form ceramic pellets that go into nuclear reactor fuel rods.
The factory will process over 150 tonnes of uranium per month to provide fuel for half of all nuclear energy produced in Canada.
The decision to allow nuclear fuel pellet production in the downtown core is being challenged in court by a local group called Citizens Against Radioactive Neighbourhoods (CARN) with the help of lawyers from the Canadian Environmental Law Association (CELA).
CARN alleges that the regulator unlawfully granted a ten-year licence to BWXT on the grounds that BWXT omitted details about the proposed operation’s physical design and environmental monitoring program which are required by the Nuclear Safety Control Act.
Although lawyers for CELA will ask the court to declare the licence to pellet unlawful, it is very unlikely that there is an Erin Brockovichesque moment in the cards because they are essentially arguing on a technicality.
That technicality will conceivably force BWXT to reveal potentially damaging information about their plans for the Peterborough-Nogojiwanong site that they would not like the public to know.
The information will include where they will be positioning the stacks that release uranium into the air.
In Toronto there are six stacks that release uranium into the air in all directions from the plant in a residential neighbourhood.
A detailed site and environmental monitoring plan would reveal if they are intending to release alpha-radiation emitting uranium particles in the direction of the Prince of Wales School or just on the rest of the downtown.
If required by the court, a detailed site plan may also reveal if BWXT is planning on moving the goal posts yet again to include working with highly radioactive enriched uranium to fuel a fleet of Small Modular Nuclear Reactors (SMNRs) currently in development.
BWXT is a leader in developing SMNR technology in Canada backed by the federal government. In a January 2020 interview CARN representative Jane Scott said, “I am sure it is their plan to work with enriched uranium because Canada is investing a lot of money in small modular reactors which require enriched uranium.”
According to Scott, “we can see a lot of hits on our http://www.nopellets.ca website from places in the US where small modular reactor businesses are located, a company called NuScale wants to make small modular reactors in Canada and has partnerships with Ontario Power Generation, Bruce Power, and BWXT in the United States.”
Scott first got involved in the fight against BWXT (formerly General Electric-Hitachi Peterborough) in 2010 when Arthur broke a story on how the company had received permission in secret in 2009 to process enriched uranium without consulting the public.
BWXT has refused to rule out the possibility of working with enriched uranium.
In January 2020 I asked BWXT spokesperson Natalie Cutler the following question, “Can you guarantee local communities that you will never bring any enriched uranium on site in Toronto or Peterborough in the future?”
Cutler claimed “We have no plans to seek a change to our licence to allow us to process enriched uranium.”
For context, BWXT also claimed it had “no plans” to conduct pelleting in Peterborough-Nogojiwanong but were seeking the “flexibility” to conduct pelleting in Peterborough-Nogojiwanong “should the need arise.”
According to Kerrie Blaise, the lawyer representing CARN, BWXT denied multiple requests to share their business plan with the public.
Citing BWXT’s proximity to the Prince of Wales Elementary School, CARN media representative Bill Templeman suggests that if BWXT wanted to conduct pelleting outside of Peterborough on “unused land,” it wouldn’t be an issue.
According to Trent Alum, Shaelyn Wabegijig, who is Algonquin Timiskaming First Nation Caribou Clan, German and Irish, the notion of “unused” land is a colonial concept rooted in the concept of “terra nullius” (no one’s land) and the Doctrine of Discovery which was used as justification for the colonial dispossession of sovereign Indigenous Nations.
Wabegijig, who works as the Program and Outreach Coordinator at the Kawartha World Issues Centre (KWIC), says the members of CARN are “people who are speaking out and trying to protect our community from danger and disease.”
According to Wabegijig, the people living near the plant deserve “communication and transparency on their own terms to determine if they want this in their neighbourhood, and a stark majority say no.”
Link: https://www.trentarthur.ca/news/enriched-secrecy-bwxts-radioactive-plans
How many citizens of France are aware that their government had put radioactive fallout onto 110,000 French Polynesians? We need a picture of Gauguin’s Tahitian ladies carrying nuclear contamination signs.
French Nuclear Tests Contaminated 110,000 In Pacific, Says Study
BBC News | 10 March 2021
“France concealed the true impact of its nuclear tests in the Pacific from the 1960s to the 1990s, a study has said.
Researchers used declassified French military documents, calculations and testimonies to reconstruct the impact of a number of the tests.
They estimated that around 110,000 people in French Polynesia were affected by the radioactive fallout.
The number represented “almost the entire” population at the time, the researchers found.
French Polynesia, a French territory made up of hundreds of islands and atolls including Tahiti, was the site of dozens of nuclear tests over 30 years.
Over the course of two years, researchers analysed around 2,000 documents released by the French military and recreated the impact of “the most contaminating” of France’s nuclear tests carried out between 1966 and 1974.
The study was carried out in collaboration between French news website Disclose, researchers from Princeton University and British firm Interprt.”
Read More: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56340159
More Poison from the Plant
Zach Ruiter | Arthur (Trent University) | 14 January 2021
“On the solstice, December 21, 2020, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) gifted BWXT Nuclear Energy Canada with an extended licence to pollute in downtown Peterborough-Nogojiwanong.
That licence allows BWXT to significantly intensify their radioactive pollution across the street from the Prince of Wales Elementary School on Monaghan Road.
Pollution will intensify by adding uranium fuel processing to their current operations, known as pelleting.”
Read More Here: https://www.trentarthur.ca/news/more-poison-from-the-plant
Big Money, Nuclear Subsidies, and Systemic Corruption
Cassandra Jeffery and M. V. Ramana | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists | 12 February 2021
“For years, the firm lobbied to get a subsidy to continue operating its unprofitable nuclear plants and maintain its revenue flow. When lobbying efforts failed to produce subsidies, it resorted to bribery to gain legislative support for House Bill 6, 2019 legislation that forces state consumers to pay into something called “the Ohio Clean Air Fund.” The green language is a smoke screen for the real purpose: to siphon nearly $150 million annually to FirstEnergy to keep its Perry and Davis-Besse nuclear power plants and two coal-fired power plants operating, while simultaneously gutting Ohio’s renewable energy standards. Also gone were the state’s energy efficiency programs, which had saved consumers and corporations millions of dollars. When citizens tried to organize a referendum to repeal the bill, FirstEnergy indulged in various dirty tactics to thwart this democratic opposition.
[…]
These companies and various associated organizations have engaged in extensive lobbying and large-scale propaganda campaigns to get governments pass legislation that makes consumers pay more for the electricity they use. In that sense, what has resulted would be better described as corporate welfare than as subsidies. The subsidies have improved these companies’ financial situation, which in turn contributes to their clout in state and national policy making and their ability to fund advocacy efforts—and even to pay politicians tidy sums of money. The larger significance of the political power these large utilities have amassed is their ability to block transition to a fully renewable and more environmentally sustainable energy system.”
Read More: https://thebulletin.org/2021/02/big-money-nuclear-subsidies-and-systemic-corruption
This way to treat Hanford radioactive waste could save $210 billion. But is it safe enough?
Annette Cary | Tri-City Herald | 7 January 2021 | https://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article248276995.html
“Grouting rather than glassifying a large amount of radioactive waste at the Hanford nuclear reservation could save taxpayers $73 billion to $210 billion, according to a new Department of Energy report.
Turning millions of gallons of waste into a concrete-like grout form also could cut 10 years off the time needed to treat radioactive waste now stored in underground tanks and permanently dispose of it, the DOE report estimated.”
Read more
DOE recently submitted a report to Congress on potential opportunities for different ways to treat waste now held at Hanford and other DOE nuclear sites.
The report was required three years ago by the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act to look at the feasibility, costs and cost savings of reclassifying high level radioactive waste to allow it to be treated and disposed of in ways not allowed for high level waste.
“Let’s trust the science and move forward,” said Washington state Sen. Sharon Brown, R-Richland, who has advocated for classifying some tank waste as low level waste to allow more efficient treatment.
The cost savings identified in the report “are a big step in the right direction, and would assist both DOE and its regulators in focusing on the mission of protecting those mist impacted — local citizens and tribal members,” said Richland Councilman Bob Thompson, chairman of Hanford Communities, a coalition of Hanford area local governments.
“We need the Hanford Site cleaned up, and I’m concerned that it will be very difficult to achieve given current cost estimates,” he said. “We should be exploring alternatives that can reduce costs and expedite the cleanup while maintaining safety and effectiveness.”
The latest cost estimate for the remaining environmental cleanup at the Hanford site, which was released two years ago, said taxpayers will need to spend $323 billion to $677 billion.
The 580-square-mile Hanford nuclear reservation in Eastern Washington was used from World War II through the Cold War to produce two-thirds of the plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program.
But Hanford Challenge, a Seattle-based watchdog group, found the report “shocking,” said its executive director, Tom Carpenter.
The report discusses reclassifying up to 80% of the 56 million gallons of Hanford tank waste to allow it to be stabilized in a concrete-like grout form, rather than vitrifying, or glassifying it.
That could open the door to grouting waste in tanks rather than emptying the tanks, Carpenter said.
RECLASSIFYING WASTE
Any waste produced when fuel irradiated at Hanford reactors was chemically processed to remove plutonium is classified as high level radioactive waste under U.S. law.
But internationally, waste classification is based not on how waste is produced as it is for high level waste in the United States, but on its radiological risk.
“It makes sense to me that we would manage and treat Hanford’s waste based on its physical characteristics, rather than how it was produced,” said David Reeploeg, the Tri-City Development Council vice president for federal programs.
Already much of the tank waste at Hanford, while by definition is high level, is referred to as low activity radioactive waste and managed as it if is low level rather than high level waste by agreement between the state of Washington and the federal government.
In 2019, DOE adopted a new policy that allows it to reclassify radioactive waste if it determines it does not exceed certain radionuclide concentrations for low level waste or does not need to be disposed of in a deep geological repository, such as the one proposed at Yucca Mountain, Nev.
However, Congress has banned the new policy from being used in Washington state under the two most recent National Defense Authorization Acts.
High level waste can still be reclassified but under a more involved process that relies on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The new DOE report to Congress stresses that reclassifying tank waste for grouting is not a proposal, only a look at potential opportunities.
Before any action is taken DOE would need to gather more data, do more analyses and discuss the proposed change with those interested in Hanford, the report said.
GROUTING TANK WASTEThe report looks at the possibility of reclassifying much of the waste stored in underground tanks in part of central Hanford, the 200 West Area, and then grouting it for disposal rather than turning it into stable glass logs at the $17 billion vitrification plant under construction.
Hanford has 56 million gallons of radioactive waste stored in underground tanks, split between the 200 East Area and the 200 West Area, which are about seven miles apart.
The underground tanks include 149 single shell tanks which are prone to leaking. They are being emptied into 27 newer double-shell tanks for more secure storage until the waste can be treated for permanent disposal.
Most of the double-shell tanks — all but three — are in the 200 East Area.
In addition to the three double-shell tanks, the 200 West Area also has 83 of the Hanford site’s single-shell tanks, some of them with a capacity of 1 million gallons.
Grouting 80% of the 200 West Area tank waste would allow the waste to be treated in a less-complex, lower temperature and lower risk method, the DOE report said.
The vitrification plant heats waste and glass forming materials to 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit to produce a stable glass form.
Some of the cost savings of grouting could come from not having to expand the vitrification plant, according to the DOE report.
The plant was never planned to be large enough to treat all of the low-activity tank waste at Hanford.
Grouting large amounts of the 200 West Area tank waste also could eliminate the need to replace or repair seven miles of cross-site transfer line, according to the report.
The pipe would move the waste from the 200 West Area to the 200 East Area for storage in double-shell tanks and treatment at the vitrification plant, which is in the 200 East Area.
Grouting the waste also could allow the waste to be sent off of Hanford for disposal, leaving less waste permanently disposed in the Eastern Washington nuclear reservation, the DOE report said.
Now the low-activity waste glassified at the vitrification plant is planned to be disposed of in a lined landfill in central Hanford.
But the state of Washington objects to waste being buried there unless it is vitrified or can be shown to be as protective of the environment as glass.
HANFORD GROUTING TESTDOE has grouted three gallons of radioactive waste in a test, using an engineered grout form that is protective of the environment, it said.
The waste was sent from Hanford to nearby Perma-Fix Environmental Solutions in Richland to be encapsulated in a specialized grout. It then was sent to a Waste Control Specialists disposal cell in Texas that was built for low-level radioactive waste from federal government sites.
Congress has already appropriated money to continue the demonstration of the grouting project on more waste, said Gary Petersen, president of Northwest Energy Associates, a nonprofit, Hanford advocacy group formed by Tri-Cities area business leaders.
He questions why the second phase of the test, which would involve grouting 2,000 gallons, has not started.
The 200 West tanks are a great place to demonstrate the grouting project because DOE currently does not seem to have a plan for treating the waste in tanks that is far from the vitrification plant, he said.
HANFORD CHALLENGE CONCERNS
However, Hanford Challenge is skeptical that it is practical to grout millions of gallons of waste and ship it off site, saying the more likely outcome of reclassifying so much tank waste would be to grout the waste within the tanks and leave it in the ground at Hanford.
The grout could fail within a matter of decades, he said, which would put more groundwater at Hanford at risk of contamination.
Although reclassifying tank waste is not currently allowed in Washington state, it is being used successfully already at DOE’s Savannah River, S.C., nuclear site, Brown pointed out.
The first use of DOE’s new reclassification policy resulted in eight gallons of recycled wastewater from vitrification at Savannah River being grouted and sent to the Waste Control Specialists repository in Texas.
Just as reclassification of waste was done at Savannah River, it “can be successfully utilized in a safe manner as well at Hanford,” Brown said.
1960
Huh? This doesn’t explain what the hell “grouting” is. Encapsulating the waste in a “specialized grout”? Tell us more about this “grout.”