5/30
Money Money Money….Money!
The WIPP measurements show there was 2 times as much Americium-241 released as Plutonium 239+240. The waste stream analysis shows that there was 92 times as much Plutonium-239+240 in the waste as Americium-241.
Recovery teams at a New Mexico nuclear waste facilit during a trip into the underground storage halls in April to assess damage from what later turned out to be a ruptured drum.
Lessons
from living close to Hanford for as long as I have taught me to
follow the money, not the talk. When accidents occur, one can almost
be assured it was due to a rush job of some sort in order to meet a
deadline. Deadlines in the nuclear industry were created not actually
to get a job done on time, but to get the bonus that comes with
getting the job done, no matter it seems, how the job gets done. This
is the part where we recognize and reiterate to new readers that
there is absolutely zero oversight anywhere in the nuclear industry.
The NRC is supposed to oversee the contractors at the job level. The
NSFSB is supposed to oversee the NRC thought they have less power of
enforcement than the NRC and the IAEA is supposed to create rules to
follow for safety in the industry, but the IAEA is made up of people
from the boards of the nuclear power companies, so you can see how
they are useless in creating a safety net for citizens, while
terrific in clearing lots of benefits and huge salaries for
themselves.
Why
is this important? Because nuclear accidents should NEVER happen. And
yet they do.
One
of the things WIPP said yesterday is that it is not their
responsibility as to how Los Alamos creates its containers or Hanford
or whomever else gives them waste. It is absolutely their
responsibility. How can they turn a blind eye to the protocols of the
companies who send them waste to store, when that waste is capable of
exploding, which of course did happen on Feb 14, 2014?
After
the opening of WIPP there were regulations that mandated checking
each lid on each drum to be sure the head-space was at the
correct level. A few years later, that regulation was softened as
checking each drum was really time consuming and expensive as it took
man hours to the job. And once more, it was softened again so that
instead of checking just a few drums from each shipment instead of
all, now they could check one if they chose to. Again, lessons from
Hanford showed me that the culture in the nuke industry, once regs
went soft, were forgotten and trouble was just over the horizon.
In
the case of the explosion at WIPP this part of the problem. But the
other part of the problem was that LANL wasn’t in compliance
either with their own regulations. Compliance is not easy to do in
the world of nuclear power. Cutting corners is. Who is checking whom?
Is there anybody out there?
But
there’s more. I told you that I did not believe from the start that
kitty litter was the issue here. I asked that you be patient and wait
to see what surfaces. Something always does!
Don
Hancock who has become the spokesperson to the community regarding
what may have happened, has not confirmed the kitty litter theory.
Once you start look at hard data, you can figure out the appropriate
questions to ask. Due to the radionuclides that blew out of the drum
into the air at WIPP, we know a few things; from my friend
Bobby1′sBlog, we see
discrepancies in the data if it were coming from LANL. Could it have
come from a different source? Idaho National Labs for instance?
The
top of the following graphic shows the isotope measurements for the
WIPP release, measured at Station A. The bottom shows the average
isotope concentrations for the LA-MIN02-V.001 waste stream from Los
Alamos, which has been identified to be the source to the plutonium
and americium release.
The WIPP measurements show there was 2 times as much Americium-241 released as Plutonium 239+240. The waste stream analysis shows that there was 92 times as much Plutonium-239+240 in the waste as Americium-241.
That
is a huge difference in the isotopic ratios. There is 184
times as much americium as would have been expected from
the average amounts in the waste stream.
While
there are individual differences in the drums, and since we don’t
know how much Plutonium-241 was released from WIPP, it is possible
that the WIPP release came from this waste stream, though it really
seems unlikely, and the container had to have been an “outlier”
that did not reflect the average proportions of isotopes in the
waste. If it turns out that more than one container contributed to
the WIPP release, this becomes wildly improbable.
I
had said from the start that I believed it would be possible for
something more devastating than TRU waste to have arrived at WIPP due
to either negligence on the part of let’s say Hanford workers or
pressure from Hanford Contractors to get the High Level Waste over
there to WIPP in small doses since the license to upgrade to HLW has
not yet gone through but has been requested by WIPP. We still don’t
know where it came from. We still don’t have the initial
measurements of how high the readings were on day one. Or each day
since. We have nothing but a pile of kitty litter that is slowly
dissolving into what I hope is the truth.
----Mimi
German
Nuclear-waste facility on high alert over risk of new explosions
US
repository scrambles to seal off barrels containing cat-litter buffer
thought to be responsible for February accident.
An explosive chemical reaction inside this drum, photographed on 22 May, was probably what caused it to become unsealed and to release radioactivity.
27
May, 2014
Time
bombs may be ticking at the United States’ only deep geological
repository for nuclear waste. US authorities concluded last week that
at least 368 drums of waste at the site could be susceptible to the
chemical reaction suspected to have caused a drum to rupture there in
February. That accident caused radioactive material to spill into the
repository and leak into the environment above ground.
The
Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico, is
mined out of a salt bed 655 metres underground, and stores low- and
medium-level military nuclear waste, containing long-lived, man-made
radioactive elements such as plutonium and americium. The suspect
drums contain nitrates and cellulose, which are thought to have
reacted to cause the explosion in February, and are located in two of
the repository’s eight vast storage rooms — 313 in panel 6, which
has already been filled, and 55 in the partly filled panel 7, where
the February accident occurred.
To
mitigate the threat of further exploding drums, the New Mexico
Environment Department (NMED) in Santa Fe issued an order on 20 May
giving the US Department of Energy (DOE) and the Nuclear Waste
Partnership — the contractor that operates the WIPP site — until
30 May to come up with a plan to “expedite” the sealing of panel
6 and part of panel 7. It is not yet clear when the panels will be
sealed, as that will depend on how long it takes to ensure that the
sealing is done safely, says Jim Winchester, a spokesman for the
NMED.
The
order was issued after an inspection team found evidence on 16 May of
heat and physical damage to a waste drum in panel 7. The drum was one
of a batch from the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New
Mexico that contained a mix of nitrate salts — generated, for
example, in the recovery of plutonium from metal and other scrap
during waste processing — and cellulose in the form of a
wheat-based commercial cat litter used to absorb liquid waste.
The
DOE believes a reaction between the nitrates and cellulose blew the
lid off of the container. But this explanation has yet to be proven,
Winchester cautions. “It is not yet known how, or if, the reaction
created the rupture in the drum(s),” he says.
The
LANL last year switched the processing of some of its waste to the
wheat-based litter from an inorganic, clay-based absorbent.
Winchester says that such changes need to first be assessed for
safety, but the NMED was not informed of the change and so did not
approve it. The WIPP has come under fire since the accident for
progressively watering down safety standards and allowing a lax
security culture to develop (see 'Call for better oversight of
nuclear-waste storage').
In
addition to the drums at the WIPP, another 57 containing the suspect
mix are still in temporary storage at the LANL. On 19 May, the NMED
told the DOE and the LANL that they had two days to present a plan to
secure the drums. In their response on 21 May, the LANL and the DOE
said that the drums were being transferred to a tent fitted with
fire-control and high-efficiency particulate air filtration to
contain any radioactive particles in the event of an accident. They
added that air radiation levels and the temperature of the drums were
being monitored, and that the drums were being inspected hourly for
signs of rupture.
The
WIPP has been closed since the February accident and will reopen only
“when it is safe to do so”, according to a 22 May statement from
the DOE. The accident is still under investigation, and parts of the
underground repository are still contaminated with radioactivity. The
DOE added that current assumptions and precautions about the hazards
of operating the WIPP are being “evaluated and revised”.
