People should also bear in mind the past.
The U.S. Department of Energy never cared about or wanted to “clean up” nuclear waste. In point of fact, the U.S. Department of Energy is in actuality the U.S. Department of Nuclear Weapons, which also incidentally does some energy work. The mission of the department is and always has been fundamentally about building and maintaining nuclear weapons, from the manufacture of plutonium and uranium-233 and other “special” materials, i.e. tritium, polonium, neptunium-237, plutonium-238, and a variety of other isotopes.
In producing these desired end products the department and its predecessors produced an immense amount of radioactive waste and chemical wastes, often mixed wastes. The department spent the lowest possible amount of money to maintain these wastes, focusing almost solely on preventing the wastes and their storage from interfering with production and their workers short term health.
Wastes from dissolving nuclear fuel to extract plutonium, uranium, neptunium, americium and curium we’re dumped into large poorly constructed underground tanks where they sat and still sit for the last 75 years. In Idaho and South Carolina these tanks were made of stainless steel and the wastes were strongly acidic. In Washington State, they went cheap on the tanks and used carbon steel. They then had to add and still have to add copious quantities of sodium hydroxide, caustic, to both neutralize the waste acidity, and to keep the pH in the tanks high to minimize corrosion of the tanks.
In time, they were required because of changes in the environmental laws to build tanks with two walls. Though these are referred to as double shell tanks, in reality they are tanks in pots with very limited abilities to inspect the gap between or under the tanks, and which allow leakage of water into the annulus. They never considered in these designs how air and water react under changing temperatures. As a result, they created what amounts to an uncontrolled heat exchanger under the tanks which condenses water on the bottom of the secondary tanks, the pots, with bottoms that have been steadily corroding, silently, unmonitored and unwitnessed since they were built.
They also failed to understand the chemistry in the tanks, or to control it adequately. And they failed to replace the tanks before they reached the ends of their design lives. Instead they simply extended their lives and did paper studies justifying their actions. Those of course failed to actually protect the tanks from failure. And so over that time, 67 of the single walled tanks or their piping failed releasing over a million gallons of high level waste containing a million curies of radioactive waste to the soil.
One double shell tank completely rotted through its bottom dumping its contents into the outer tank. Just partly emptying that tank of the waste they could easily remove cost over $100 million and took two years. DOE’s planning documents and emergency plans required emptying any tank showing danger of leaking in 24 hours. DOE’s pure incompetence wouldn’t even allow them to admit the tank was leaking for over a year, let alone actually do anything. It then took another year to obtain funding and procure the pumps and piping needed to empty the tanks in a complicated dance that involved moving wastes in and through half a dozen other tanks.
And, oh by the way, the tank that failed had just received radioactively screaming hot (radioactively and thermally) waste from the work to empty tanks from a failing single shell tank farm.
Seven of the double shell tanks have either already rotted through their secondary tank bottoms, or been so damaged by bottom corrosion that they cannot be assured to not have rotted through, rendering them single shell tanks. DOE refuses to even admit that. Instead they rely on an engineering assessment which they funded to say that there is no direct evidence of failure, despite a complete inability to inspect most of the area of the tank bottoms, and a complete lack of testing using other means commonly used in industry (e.g. helium or heavy gases to detect penetrations). Why you ask? Well, because they decided decades ago to use those tanks to feed their treatment plant and to use the money they would spend on tanks building that plant. But now 20 years later that plant is still not running and it won’t start for four or five more years. And the bulk of the plant will never and can never work. Their ideas for how to do it more cheaply by separating the waste turned into a failed $20 billion dollar boondoggle. But, DOE can never admit failure or error. As a result, they never ever learn from their failures.
Through the last 75 years, DOE added immense amounts of caustic to the tank wastes. Much of that is neutralized by carbon dioxide from the air necessitating the addition of even more. They have dumped over a million gallons of high level wastes directly to the soil in addition to the leaks. And they dumped a quarter billion gallons of less contaminated water directly up the soil.
That leaked and dumped waste they refer to as “past practice waste” and DOE now tries to argue that the moment the high level waste contacted the soil that it ceased being high level waste and hence requires no cleanup at all. This is of course absurd, insane and in direct contravention of the law. But DOE doesn’t care about law. They are after all the Department of Nuclear Weapons. Even today, they do not embrace the mission to resolve their past errors and to protect people and the environment. They cannot. The people who work on that mission were hired by people who in turn were hired by people who philosophically do not believe in the mission. Most have parents and grandparents and relatives who made the messes in the first place. And of course they view them as valiant people who could not have done bad things, so therefor they did valiant and right things and the mess cannot really be a problem.
They change the rules whenever the rules get in the way. And they routinely ignore the laws.
Humans are silly creatures, absurd really; not to mention arrogant and foolish.
In the 1990s an Undersecretary of Energy in trying to avoid cleanup and evade the legal requirements began asking publicly of the public “How clean is clean?” Well I don’t know sir just how filthy is “clean”?
DOE does not believe in “cleanup”, or in anything anywhere close to it. They have now spread their filth far and wide. And having done so they argue that it is now diluted enough to claim it really isn’t high level waste anymore, and we should just leave it there and kick a skim of dirt over the top, put up fences or signs to prevent people from digging and declare success! See how much cheaper that is?!
At Savannah’s River, they “closed” their tanks by filling them first with “special” grout. That was intended to chemically convert the technetium to a sulfide. That didn’t work though as the grout and wastes did not mix. So they dumped powdered grout on top then added structural grout to fill the tanks and prepared an analysis that claimed that the technetium sulfide would never oxidize and again become mobile. Even with that, they barely met standards for protecting groundwater. And they “closed” the tanks under the drinking water act, rather than under the toxic and radioactive waste laws. The drinking water act has no provisions for doing that.
In time that foolishness will reveal itself. And those wastes will then need to be cleaned up at incredibly high cost.
As to Hanford’s wastes. Well, no problem there. There are folks in Texas who see profit and dollar signs in dumping the waste in near surface disposal and kicking a skim of dirt over it there. And here in America, we are all about profit.
Sam
