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Suddenly No Solution For 56 Million Gallons Of Highly Radioactive Toxic Waste Leaking Into The Ground
Wolf Richter www.testosteronepit.com www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter
Engineers around the world have done a great job developing nuclear technologies to serve mankind’s many endeavors: medical devices, power generators, naval propulsion systems, or the most formidable weapons ever built, so formidable that they could largely wipe out mankind and its many endeavors.
However, engineers haven’t figured out yet what to do with the highly radioactive and toxic materials nuclear technologies leave behind. They leak through corroded containers, contaminate soil, water, and air, and after decades, we try to deal with them somehow, but mainly we’re shuffling that problem to the next generation. The enormous sums coming due over time were never included in the original costs. We’re not even talking about an accident, like Fukushima, whose costs will likely reach $1 trillion, but about maintenance and cleanup.
For example, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State, the largest, most daunting environmental cleanup project in the US. More than 11,000 people work on it. Nine relatively small reactors on that property produced plutonium, starting in 1943 through the Cold War. In 1987, the last reactor was shut down. What remains are various structures, such as the evocatively named “Plutonium Finishing Plant” (aerial photo: red “X” marks denote sections to be demolished) or the “Plutonium Vault Complex” that stored plutonium for nuclear weapons (photo of corridor).
Buried underground are 177 tanks containing 56 million gallons of highly radioactive and toxic waste. The 31 oldest tanks, made of a single layer of now rust-perforated carbon steel, have been leaking highly radioactive and toxic sludge into the ground for decades.
Hence the “Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant,” a radiochemical processing facility. In its annual report to Congress, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, which has jurisdiction over the “defense nuclear facilities” of the Department of Energy (DOE), describes the task at Hanford:
After these wastes are retrieved from the tanks, the plant will chemically separate the waste into two streams of differing radioactive hazard and solidify them into glass in stainless steel canisters. The low-radioactivity glass will be disposed of onsite, while the high-level waste glass will be shipped offsite for permanent disposal once a repository is available.
Turns out, almost none of it, according to the report, can be done safely or at all. And that “repository?” It doesn’t exist. Despite decades of trying, the US has not been able to come up with one.
In 1989, the DOE inked a Tri-Party Agreement with the EPA and Washington State to clean up the site. It would require the construction of a special facility. In 1990, the DOE paid for two sets of plans. Then nothing. People got promoted out of there, did things, or retired. A decade passed. In 2001, construction finally began.
Another decade passed. In 2010, with technical challenges galore, a guy named Walter Tamosaitis, a former engineering manager at the site, sent the Board a letter, claiming that he “was removed from the project because he identified technical issues that could affect safety.” An investigation followed. Later, the Board conceded that Hanford had “a flawed safety culture” that was hindering “the identification and resolution of technical and safety issues.”
By that time, with the plant far from finished, the price tag had ballooned to $12.2 billion. The design and construction contractor, Bechtel National, a unit of the Bechtel Corporation, was getting rich off this project and wouldn’t mind if it dragged on forever. CEOs come and go, but the project’s reliable revenue stream would always be there.
Now, almost 25 years after the original agreement, the price has ballooned further, but the DOE no longer has an estimate, nor does it have any idea as to when the plant will be finished. If ever. Because it has some, let’s say, issues. As the report in bland bureaucratese points out: “Although this is a one-of-a-kind project with novel technology that requires significant research and development, it is being designed concurrent with construction. As a result....”
As a result of starting to build the dang thing before they solved the major technical problems, they now have a mess on their hands; and pending a solution to “the remaining technical issues,” explained DOE spokeswoman, Aoife McCarthy, construction has now stopped.
The Board raised “a serious question as to whether this plant is going to work at all,” said Senate Energy Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon. The report lists design problems that could lead to mechanical breakdowns, chemical explosions, and nuclear reactions.
But leaving the highly radioactive and toxic sludge in the underground tanks would be dangerous as well. The older single-shell tanks are leaking. And as the report explains, many of the “double-shell tanks currently have enough flammable gas retained in the waste that, if released in the tank headspace, could create a flammable atmosphere.” And blow up.
“These are the questions that should have been resolved at the front end,” groaned Senator Wyden.
Precisely the quandary not just of Hanford but of the entire nuclear age! We’ve figured out the first part. But we haven’t figured out how to deal with the second part, radioactive waste. Entire careers have been and will be made at Hanford in decommissioning the site and removing its structures, reactors, and contaminated materials. Many more careers will be made dealing with the highly radioactive and toxic sludge. It will eat up fortunes for generations.
Catastrophic nuclear accidents, like Chernobyl or Fukushima, are very rare, we’re told incessantly. But when they occur, they’re costly. So costly that the French government, when it came up with estimates, kept them secret. But the report was leaked. Read.... Potential Cost Of A Nuclear Accident? So High It’s A Secret!
And here is my review of David Stockman’s latest book, an awesome romp through the economic, financial, and monetary shenanigans of our times! Read.... David Stockman: “Money Printers And Wall Street Coddlers”
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I am not so sure. The Earth is going to turn into Venus in about 500 Million years when the continents collide again to form the next pangea. The Sun is getting warmer as it slow starts to burn Helium. It will take more than 500 million years for another intelligent species to evolve from what ever life remains after a global war\meltdown, assuming about 95% of multicell life goes extinct.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_the_Earth
"In about 1.1 billion years, the solar luminosity will be 10% higher than at present. This will cause the atmosphere to become a "moist greenhouse", resulting in a runaway evaporation of the oceans."
[However the text does not include the issue of the continents remerging to form a supercontinent. When this happens it will significantly increase global temperatures (as it did when it happen previously about 300 million years ago. Back then the Sun had less helium than it will 500 million years ago. The current theory is that life will die off when then next pangea forms]
In bizarro world, natural selection picks you (and not to single you out for survival)
We'd bring it with us as power source--already been done I think.
"MAKING plutonium for nuclear bombs takes balls, but not in the way you might think. In 1965, scientists at the Hanford nuclear weapons complex in Washington state wanted to investigate the impact of radiation on fertility - and they weren't hidebound by ethics.
In a specially fortified room in the basement of Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, volunteer prisoners were asked to lie face down on a trapezoid-shaped bed. They put their legs into stirrups, and let their testicles drop into a plastic box of water where they were zapped by X-rays.
The experiments, which lasted for a decade and involved 131 prisoners, came up with some unsurprising results. Even at the lowest dose - 0.1 gray - sperm was damaged, and at twice that dose the prisoners became sterile. They were paid $5 a month for their trouble, plus $25 per biopsy and $100 for a compulsory vasectomy at the end so they didn't father children with mutations.
The testicle tests are just one of many disturbing details Kate Brown has unearthed from the official archives in her fascinating nuclear history. She also tells how tunnels created by muskrats undermined one of Hanford's storage ponds, causing 60 million litres of radioactive effluent to pour into the Columbia river.
And there is the scary tale of how Hanford scientists conducted one of their riskiest experiments, later dubbed the "green run". For 7 hours, they processed highly radioactive "green" fuel that had not been allowed to decay for as long as usual - and showered 407,000 gigabecquerels of radioactive iodine over nearby cities. The green run is said to have been an attempt to mimic what the US thought the Soviet Union was doing to boost plutonium production at its Mayak nuclear weapons plant at Ozersk, in the Urals.
It is the looking-glass links between Hanford and Mayak, and the communities that host them, that form the central theme of Brown's book. They were two secretive citadels, dedicated to producing as much plutonium as possible to fuel the cold war arsenals of the world's two opposing superpowers. They both conferred wealth and privilege on their elite staff, copying each other to create what Brown styles as a "plutopia".
But the two vast, creaking, nuclear complexes also deliberately discharged huge amounts of radioactivity into the environment, cut corners and caused countless accidents and leaks. Brown estimates that during their existence they each released at least 7.4 billion gigabecquerels, four times the amount released by the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine in 1986.
The rivers that drain the two sites, the Columbia and the Techa, have both been called the most radioactive in the world, and many thousands of people who live downstream and downwind say the contamination has made them sick. These are, says Brown, "slow motion disasters" created and covered up by state machines.
Brown argues that the US and the Soviet Union both subverted science to maintain the plutopia. The most shocking example was the US Atomic Energy Commission's takeover of seminal Japanese research into the health impacts of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was necessary, according to a senior AEC official in 1955, to ensure that "misleading and unsound reports" were "kept to a minimum"."
From the book:
http://www.amazon.com/Plutopia-Families-American-Plutonium-Disasters/dp/0199855765Thank you, truly amazing. What the US populace don't know about our govt. and it's agents.
... subverted science to maintain the plutopia. ...
THAT is the most important problem that we face!
"Spirituality is practicality on all levels."
"We" have gotten seriously stuck in a rut on some levels, while deliberately ignoring other levels. "We" are not too stupid, as "we" are too clever at solving problems at certain practical levels, while deliberately ignoring other levels.
We need to make profound paradigm breakthroughs in political science, and in militarism most of all.
THERE ARE PROFOUND PARADOXES INHERENT IN THE HISTORY OF WARFARE, WHICH HAVE DRIVEN THE REST OF THE PROBLEMS!
There are no good ways forwards that do not resolve those paradoxes better, as much as they can be. The core of the problems that Neolithic civilization faces is that warfare is the oldest and best developed social science. However, success in warfare depended upon being the best at deceits, and backing those deceits up with violence. That has "subverted science!"
Therefore, everything that we have today, as the sovereign powers of states, developed from the history of the War Kings. As information became more important than power, that trend continued to be magnified, so that the War Kings morphed into the Fraud Kings, or the central banks, and the banksters, that now covertly control all the biggest governments in the world. That has "subverted science!"
The social pyramid systems, based on force backed frauds, in which small groups control larger groups through organized lies, backed by coercion, have been astronomically amplified in size by progress in science and technology. However, that science is primarily still employed to be better at dishonesty and violence, in order to keep most people ignorant and afraid, so that they can be controlled and exploited by a few people.
The depth of that brainwashing is PROFOUND, because the only opposition that has been allowed has been controlled opposition, which tended to be "black sheep," who pointed out more of the social facts about what the wolves were doing, but then, advocated that the solutions to those problems were for everyone to become better sheep.
Thus, extremely unscientific political science continues to be based on false fundamental dichotomies, and their related impossible ideals, as the ways to understand the problems, and moreover, as the ways to promote their "solutions." Therefore, what happens, over and over again, and is almost the ONLY thing that one ever sees happening, is that relative dichotomies are used to analyze history, which is done relatively well, BUT, then, when turning to their "solutions," to the problems which have been identified during that analysis, back come those false fundamental dichotomies in full force, which manifests as "solutions" based on impossible ideals.
Impossible ideals always backfire in the real world, and actually make the opposite happen. The problems we have are that success in other sciences, such as physics and biology, through paradigm breakthrough after breakthrough, enabling awesome new technologies, has barely been matched by any corresponding progress in human sciences.
Therefore, we have weapons of mass destruction, which are trillions of times more powerful, BUT, they are used to back up frauds with the threat of more force, in increasingly insane ways! The truly suicidal nature of that is manifesting more and more, everywhere, as symbolized by the radioactive pollution of the planet!
However, we continue to have the social situation where the biggest bullies' bullshit dominates everything, including their controlled opposition of black sheep. ... That is what one finds everywhere, including on the pages of Zero Hedge.
What needs to be done is paradigm shifts in political science, and especially in the areas of the militarism running the murder systems, operating the death controls. Those should be understood with unitary mechanisms, and worked upon as energy systems, which may evolve dynamic equilibria. Since money is backed by murder, the same things manifest throughout the financial systems in the monetary and taxation systems. (After all there is a continuum between the War Kings, through to the Fraud Kings.)
A society which actually becomes based on technologies, which are based on science, NEEDS to similarly go through paradigm shifts to appreciate the philosophy of science in radically different ways! Nothing is forcing us to do that more than the development of atomic power. Atomic power was developed from atomic bombs, and the atomic bomb production massively subsidized the atomic power production. Those trends all looped around and around through the social pyramid systems being operated by the people who were the best at being dishonest, and backing that up with violence, being the people who actually controlled the globalizing Neolithic civilization!
Since we really did have the history of the War Kings enable the history of the Fraud Kings, the ways that we developed atomic power production was the most extreme example of the general pattern of social facts, that we have a fundamentally fraudulent financial accounting system. (E.g., the "insurance" of atomic power plants is completely bullshit, as permitted by governments.)
However, the deeper problems are that we can never resolve those problems with the impossible ideals that there should be no murder system whatsoever! The deeper FACT is that money is backed by murder, and it is NOT possible for human realities to exist any other way. It is theoretically possible to do better social science, which faces those facts. However, the established systems are based on deliberately denying those facts, and their controlled opposition spouts the same bullshit, when claiming that those facts should not exist.
Thus, the current global ruling classes are on runaway trajectories towards more genocidal wars, backed by democidal martial law, BUT, the opposition to those vicious wolf type people is almost totally made up of black sheep type people who deny that their should be any murder system, doing death controls, at all! The establishment denies the social facts, regarding how their money is backed by murder, while their controlled opposition denies that that must exist, in some form or another. Therefore, we almost NEVER get a better public debate about how to run the death controls, to back up the debt controls. Instead, we have runaway debt insanities, which are symbolized most extremely by putting debts upon future generations, and the burden to manage radioactive waste for thousands and thousands of years in the future is the most extreme example of that kind of social insanity!
This can all be boiled down to a few crisp sentences, which are already obvious to most everyone. Mankind has made huge strides in science, but very little in psycholgy and social sciences. We are still just smart chimps with ugly instincts that are not well suppressed, especially at the group level.
Very perceptive. If you are able to tie these assertions to fact in a rhetorically coherent way (what you keep presenting on ZH are merely assertions) you have the makings of an important book. I encourage you to do this. I challenge you to do this.
BTW--why do you keep referring to our civilization as "neolithic"? Whatever happened to the Bronze Age? Iron Age? etc.
Keep up the provocative work.
Thanks Optimusprime!
I like using the big series of Paleolithic, Neolithic, Translithic. I.e., old stone age, new stone age, and beyond stone age. I regard the Bronze Age, and Iron Age, as phases of the development of Neolithic Civilization.
In my twenties, I did publish a couple of vanity press books:
1,000 copies of Megasynthesis, and 200 copies of Letters Home From Oedipus.
However, I kind of lost motivation for making more mere books, since for the last thirty years I have been doing political experiments, which gave rise to fifteen of those years becoming court cases against the government of Canada over the laws controlling the funding of the political processes. Unfortunately, I now longer believe that there is any practical purpose in bothering to write books, nor anything else that I can imagine doing ... I tread water, or mark time, continuing my standing political experiments, regarding the use of the Canadian political contribution tax credit, which requires me to keep a fringe political party in Canada registered, to allow me to continue to legally do that.
http://www.marijuanaparty.ca/article.php3?id_article=215
However, so far, the standing conclusions of all my political experiments and court cases are that there are no good reasons to believe that the 99% of the public that acts like political idiots are going to significantly change. Of course, I wish that were not true, and I do like to indulge in political science fiction, regarding some series of political miracles which might see that social situation change ... However, there are no good grounds that I am aware to actually believe that the vast majority of people are going to stop acting like Zombie Sheeple. Therefore, I feel very little motivation to present my ideas any better, since everything I have already done, beating these kinds of issues to death for several decades, has not give me any good reasons to believe things will get better. On the contrary, I tend to believe, these days, that writing another book or more would be nothing but another self-indulgence.
Indeed, the only reason why I bother to post on Zero Hedge is to pass the time, in my own self-indulgent way, since I am quite convinced that better arguments, based on evidence and logic, will continue to be mostly ignored, and make no difference to the established systems, which are based on lies, backed by violence.
To illustrate that point, I published my first writing about atomic energy production back in the 1970s. Nothing whatsoever has changed, except that the situation has mostly gotten worse! Similarly the original reason why I bothered to become involved in registered political activities was due to the atomic weapons race, that was particularly bad during the 1980s.
http://www.thebulletin.org/content/doomsday-clock/timeline
I first ran in an election for the Green Party of Canada back in 1984, because the nuclear weapons race INSANITIES were worse then! Things did get better for a while, but then got worse again. Furthermore, when judged from an objective point of view, I believe that the doomsday clock that the atomic scientists maintain is too optimistic! (In my opinion, they tend to underestimate how evil the banksters actually are, and grossly underestimate the degree to which there have been a long history of false flag attacks used to deliberately start wars!)
Anyway, although I admire the recent works of testosteronepit, and George Washington, on these topics, the problems with the funding of politics continue to make everything like that relatively insignificant. It is typically the case that the atomic power industry has orders of magnitude more money than the people that oppose them. Furthermore, it is typical that they make a profit from succeeding when they sell their lies, while those opposing them make no profit from promoting more truth. That is the overall situation throughout our whole society. 99% of the people have never paid for any significant political activity, while 1% have overwhelmingly paid for almost everything. That 1% makes fantastic profits from successfully corrupting governments, while those opposing them never make any money from stopping something from happening.
That is the problem I have been directly working on for a few decades, only to discover, beyond any reasonable doubt, that 99% of the people ARE Zombie Sheeple, and there are no rational justifications to expect that to change for the better in the foreseeable future. Therefore, I write mainly to amuse myself, not to accomplish anything, since I now believe that it is practically impossible to realistically accomplish anything! Hence, I no longer feel enough rational motivation to bother to publish better books.
Great way to make an extra $5 a month.
My sperm is not for sale at any price. Wait - you said $5?
Is that 5 bucks per sperm?
If it is, definitely sign me up