Tag Archives: Radiation

Hanford nuclear site accident puts focus on aging U.S. facilities

An aerial photo shows Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, U.S. on July 5, 2011. Courtesy National Nuclear Security Administration/Handout via REUTERS

By Tom James

SEATTLE (Reuters) – The collapse of a tunnel used to store radioactive waste at one of the most contaminated U.S. nuclear sites has raised concerns among watchdog groups and others who study the country’s nuclear facilities because many are aging and fraught with problems.

“They’re fighting a losing battle to keep these plants from falling apart,” said Robert Alvarez, a former policy adviser at the U.S. Department of Energy who was charged with making an inventory of nuclear sites under President Bill Clinton.

“The longer you wait to deal with this problem, the more dangerous it becomes,” said Alvarez, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he focuses on nuclear energy and disarmament.

The Energy Department did not respond to requests for comment.

No radiation was released during Tuesday’s incident at a plutonium-handling facility in the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, but thousands of workers were ordered to take cover and some were evacuated as a precaution.

The state of facilities in the U.S. nuclear network has been detailed by the Department of Energy, Government Accountability Office and Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. They have noted eroding walls, leaking roofs, and risks of electrical fires and groundwater contamination.

In 2016, Frank Klotz, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, an Energy Department agency overseeing maintenance of nuclear warheads, warned Congress about risks posed by aging facilities.

Decontaminating and demolishing the Energy Department’s shuttered facilities will cost $32 billion, it said in a 2016 report. It also noted a $6 billion maintenance backlog.

In the 1940s the U.S. government built Hanford and other complexes to produce plutonium and uranium for atomic bombs under the Manhattan Project.

“That was an era when the defense mission took priority over everything else,” said Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “We’re dealing with the legacy of that.”

RISKS DOCUMENTED

Many of those sites are now vacant but contaminated.

A 2009 Energy Department survey found nearly 300 shuttered, contaminated and deteriorating sites. Six years later it found that fewer than 60 had been cleaned up.

A 2015 Energy Department audit said delays in cleaning contaminated facilities “expose the Department, its employees and the public to ever-increasing levels of risk.”

Risks identified at the sites included leaking roofs carrying radioactivity into groundwater, roof collapses and electrical fires that could release radioactive particles.

A 2014 Energy Department audit noted a high risk of fire and groundwater contamination at the shuttered Heavy Element Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is surrounded by homes and businesses near California’s Bay Area.

Problems have also been identified at active facilities including the Savannah River Site, a nuclear reservation in South Carolina. A 2015 report by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board found “severe” erosion in concrete walls of an exhaust tunnel used to prevent release of radioactive air.

A 2016 Energy Department audit of one of the United States’ main uranium handling facilities, the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, warned that “intense precipitation or snow” could collapse parts its roof, possibly causing an accident involving radioactivity.

“It sounds crazy, but it’s true,” said Don Hancock, who has studied the Tennessee facility in his work at the Southwest Information and Research Center, an Albuquerque nonprofit that monitors nuclear sites.

In Hanford’s case, risk of a tunnel collapse was known in 2015, when the Energy Department noted wooden beams in one tunnel had lost 40 percent of their strength and were being weakened by gamma radiation.

Energy Department spokesman Mark Heeter in nearby Richland said in an email that the agency saw Tuesday’s prompt discovery of the collapse as a success.

“The maintenance and improvement of aging infrastructure across the Hanford site … remains a top priority,” he said.

Nationwide, part of the risk comes from having to maintain and safeguard so many sites with different types of nuclear waste, said Frank Wolak, head of Stanford University’s Program on Energy and Sustainable Development.

“You’re asking for trouble with the fact that you’ve got it spread all over the country,” he said. “The right answer is to consolidate the stuff that is highly contaminated, and apply the best technology to it.”

(Reporting by Tom James; Editing by Ben Klayman)

Tunnel collapses at Washington nuclear waste plant; no radiation released

A 20-foot wide hole over a decommissioned plutonium-handling rail tunnel is shown at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Hanford Site, Washington, U.S., May 9, 2017. Courtesy Department of Energy/Handout via REUTERS

By Tom James and Scott DiSavino

(Reuters) – A tunnel partly collapsed on Tuesday at a plutonium-handling facility at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, but there was no indication workers or the public were exposed to radiation, federal officials said.

Workers evacuated or took cover and turned off ventilation systems after damage was discovered in the wall of a transport tunnel about 170 miles (270 km) east of Seattle, officials with the Department of Energy’s Hanford Joint Information Center said.

The damage was more serious than initially reported, and the take-cover order was expanded to cover the entire facility after response crews found a 400-square-foot section of the decommissioned rail tunnel had collapsed, center spokesman Destry Henderson said in a video posted on Facebook.

“The roof had caved in, about a 20-foot section of that tunnel, which is about a hundred feet long,” he said.

“This is purely precautionary. No employees were hurt and there is no indication of a spread of radiological contamination,” Henderson said of the shelter order.

No spent nuclear fuel is stored in the tunnel, Energy Department officials said. Energy Department Secretary Rick Perry has been briefed on the incident.

Tom Carpenter, the executive director with watchdog organization Hanford Challenge who has spoken with workers at the site since the incident, called the tunnel collapse worrisome and said the evacuation was the correct call.

“There is a big hole there and radiation could be beaming out,” he said.

“It’s not clear to me that they know whether particulate radiation has escaped,” Carpenter added. “If there is a cloud of radioactive particulates, then that can have an impact on worker health and the community. It does not take a lot for those particulates to end up in someone’s lung.”

The site is in southeastern Washington on the Columbia River. Operated by the federal government, it was established in the 1940s and manufactured plutonium that was used in the first nuclear bomb as well as other nuclear weapons. It is now being dismantled and cleaned up by the Energy Department.

Mostly decommissioned, Hanford has been a subject of controversy and conflict between state and local authorities, including a lawsuit over worker safety and ongoing cleanup delays. Carpenter called it the most contaminated U.S. site.

Carpenter said he expects total cleanup costs could reach $300 billion to $500 billion.

(Reporting by Tom James in Seattle and Scott DiSavino in New York; Writing by Ben Klayman; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Lisa Shumaker)

Highest levels of radiation reported by TEPCO from Fukushima power plant

A worker puts up new logo of TEPCO Holdings and Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) Group on the wall ahead of the transition to a holding company system through a compan

By Kami Klein

Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) announced the highest documented radiation levels ever recorded in reactor 2 of the damaged Fukushima  No. 1 power plant.  Based on its analysis of measurements and pictures taken by a remote controlled sensor and camera instrument, radiation levels recorded were the highest ever documented since the triple core meltdown in March 2011. TEPCO also reported close to a 3 foot hole in the metal grating under the pressure vessel of reactor 2 of the damaged Fukushima No. 1 power plant.

According to the Japan Times the power plant has reached a maximum of 530 sieverts per hour.  At 530 sieverts, a person could die from even the briefest exposure.  This highlights the difficulties that lie ahead for TEPCO and the Japanese Government as they try to figure out a way to dismantle all three reactors that were damaged by the March, 2011 9.0 earthquake and giant tsunami that killed almost 16,000 people.

Officials had never taken into account for the “unimaginable” radiation levels that are being seen.  Experts say that 1 sievert could lead to infertility, loss of hair and cataracts.  Cancer risks increase substantially with any radiation levels above the 100 millisieverts or 1 sievert mark.

In a report by the Washington Post, TEPCO recorded radiation near the reactor core using a stick-like robot equipped with a camera and a device designed to measure radiation levels and has suggested that some melted fuel escaped.  Officials state that this was the first time this kind of device has been able to get into this part of the reactor, which explains the unprecedented amount of radiation recorded.  TEPCO said that at this level of radiation, a robot would only operate for less than two hours before it was destroyed.

If deposits that have been seen on portions of the grating are proven to be melted fuel, it would be the first time they have found even a trace of any sign of the fuel rods since the core meltdowns occurred. Levels of radiation are too high to check the actual condition of the fuel, which they believe has melted through their pressure vessels and is pooled at the bottom of their containment units.  This fuel MUST be discovered and removed before the plants can be decommissioned.

Reuters reports that TEPCO has been developing robots that can swim under water and navigate obstacles in damaged tunnels and piping to search for the melted fuel rods.  But as soon as the robots get close to the reactors, the radiation destroys their wiring and renders them useless.  TEPCO does plan to send this robot into Reactor 1 but are still unsure regarding Reactor 2 because of the very intense radiation levels.

Officials still state that these levels may not actually be rising but because they have not been tested so closely to the reactor, they are just now getting a better idea of the true levels recorded. TEPCO does report a 30% margin of error in the tests.

The effects of the radiation on the rest of the world have been in constant discussion and arguments among government officials and environmental scientists.  One year ago, PBS reported that more than 80 percent of the radioactivity from the damaged reactors ended up in the Pacific, far more than ever reached the ocean from Chernobyl or Three Mile Island.  A small fraction is currently on the seafloor, but the rest was swept up by the Kuroshio current, a western Pacific version of the Gulf Stream, and carried out to sea.  Recently, radioactive contamination has been documented near British Columbia and California.

 

Ukraine Chernobyl victims remember on 30th anniversary

A man lights a candle at a memorial, dedicated to firefighters and workers who died after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, during a night service in the city of Slavutych

By Alessandra Prentice and Natalia Zinets

KIEV (Reuters) – Ukraine held memorial services on Tuesday to mark the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster which permanently poisoned swathes of eastern Europe and highlighted the shortcomings of the secretive Soviet system.

In the early hours of April 26, 1986, a botched test at the nuclear plant in then-Soviet Ukraine triggered a meltdown that spewed deadly clouds of atomic material into the atmosphere, forcing tens of thousands of people from their homes.

President Petro Poroshenko attended a ceremony at the Chernobyl plant, which sits in the middle of an uninhabitable ‘exclusion zone’ the size of Luxembourg.

“The issue of the consequences of the catastrophe is not resolved. They have been a heavy burden on the shoulders of the Ukrainian people and we are still a long way off from overcoming them,” he said.

More than half a million civilian and military personnel were drafted in from across the former Soviet Union as so-called liquidators to clean-up and contain the nuclear fallout, according to the World Health Organization.

Thirty-one plant workers and firemen died in the immediate aftermath of the accident, most from acute radiation sickness.

Over the past three decades, thousands more have succumbed to radiation-related illnesses such as cancer, although the total death toll and long-term health effects remain a subject of intense debate.

Nikolay Chernyavskiy, 65, who worked at Chernobyl and later volunteered as a liquidator, recalls climbing to the roof of his apartment block in the nearby town of Prypyat to get a look at the plant after the accident.

“My son said ‘Papa, Papa, I want to look too’. He’s got to wear glasses now and I feel like it’s my fault for letting him look,” Chernyavskiy said.

The anniversary has garnered extra attention due to the imminent completion of a giant 1.5 billion euros ($1.7 billion) steel-clad arch that will enclose the stricken reactor site and prevent further leaks for the next 100 years.

The project was funded with donations from more than 40 governments and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

Even with the new structure, the surrounding zone – 2,600 square km (1,000 square miles) of forest and marshland on the border of Ukraine and Belarus – will remain uninhabitable and closed to unsanctioned visitors.

The disaster and the government’s reaction highlighted the flaws of the Soviet system with its unaccountable bureaucrats and entrenched culture of secrecy. For example, the evacuation order only came 36 hours after the accident.

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has said he considers Chernobyl one of the main nails in the coffin of the Soviet Union, which eventually collapsed in 1991.

(Additional reporting by Margaryta Chornokondratenko, Sergei Karazy and Andriy Perun; Editing by Robert Birsel and Richard Balmforth)

St. Louis Landfill Fire Gets Closer to Radioactive Waste

An underground fire at Bridgeton Landfill, located about 20 miles from downtown St. Louis, has been smoldering since 2010 with radioactive waste buried less than 1000 yards away at West Lake Landfill. The West Lake Landfill was designated as an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund site in 1990, but the federal government is still deciding how to clean up the waste.

Missouri Attorney General  Koster released reports last month that showed  radioactive waste has contaminated trees and groundwater outside the perimeter of the landfill, where World War II-era uranium byproducts were dumped illegally in the 1970s.

“It’s no longer just underneath the landfill itself.  It has migrated through the air and groundwater and we have expert testimony that we’re going to present that shows that,” he said.

Koster is speaking of the on going lawsuit against the owner of  the Bridgeton and West Lake Landfills, Republic Services, to force them to clean up the locations.  Koster filed a lawsuit against the company in 2013, claiming negligent management and violation of state environmental laws, the Associated Press reported. The case is scheduled to go to trial in March 2016.

In a recently revealed St. Louis County emergency response plan it was noted that there is potential for radioactive fallout with no warning. At least 4 area school districts sent letters to parents on Monday explaining their plans to evacuate or shelter students and close off air intakes to limit exposure should the fire reach the radioactive dumping area.

Superintendent of the Pattonville School District wrote, “We remain frustrated by the situation at the landfill. This impacts not only our community, but the entire St. Louis region.”

Analysts with Republic Services show the company’s gas wells aimed at keeping the smoldering heat from reaching the radioactive waste have been successful. The Environmental Protection Agency, which oversees West Lake Landfill as a toxic Superfund site, has also made repeated assurances that it is safe and in an AP report has accused the Missouri Attorney General of causing “public angst and confusion.”

Landfill spokesman Russ Knocke told KMOX St. Louis, “Bridgeton Landfill, whose management team works closely with the region’s first responder community, is safe and intensively monitored.”

First Decontaminated Water from Fukushima Released into Ocean

The first batches of water that have reportedly been decontaminated after being flooded with radiation from the Fukushima nuclear disaster has been released into the Pacific Ocean.

Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the owner and operator of Fukushima, said they released 850 tons of formerly radioactive water extracted from the ground near the plant into the ocean.  TEPCO says the filtering process used makes the water safe for the environment and aquatic life.

The release was part of a plan to ease the buildup of toxic water at the complex.  Around 300 tons of untainted groundwater is flowing daily into the complex and mixing with the radioactive water within the reactors.

The release comes after years of fishermen fighting the power company fearing that the water is still too dangerous and would harm their livelihood.

However, one member of a committee designed to make sure there is no repeat of the meltdown, says that real danger is contaminated water that is still being stored on the site.

“The risk that you run is that you have all these tanks full of water,” Dale Klein told AFP in an interview.  “The longer you store the water, the more likely you are going to have (an) uncontrolled release.”

At least 680,000 tons of highly radioactive water is still being stored on the site of the plant.

Kitty Litter Mix-up Caused Major Radiation Leak

The Department of Energy says a nuclear lab used the wrong kind of kitty litter to dispose of hazardous waste that lead to the major radiation leak at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.

The report states that the Los Alamos National Laboratory took actions with the material that one chemist called the creation of a “potential bomb.”  The LANL works on nuclear technology and other high level national security projects.

The lab reportedly used a wheat-based kitty litter instead of clay-based.  The resulting mixture is similar to plastic explosives according to the Santa Fe New Mexican.

“This action may have led to an adverse chemical reaction within the drums resulting in serious safety implications,” the Department of Energy’s Office of Inspector General said in an October report.

At least 20 workers at the plant were injured by low levels of radiation as a result of the leak and the storage facility is still closed.  DOE estimates it could cost $500 million to reopen the storage facility.

Navy Testing San Francisco Area Homes For Radiation

The land was declared safe for residential housing.  No threats to the public.

Now, the U.S. Navy is conducting house-to-house testing for radiation after an empty home on a former Naval base was found to contain radium.

The homes are located on a man-made island called “Treasure Island.”  The area once served as a U.S. Navy base and has been redevelopments under an agreement from the Department of Defense with San Francisco’s Treasure Island Development Authority.

The Navy cleaned up the base after closure in 1997.  The DoD then leased the homes to civilians that were once military housing.

The Navy had declared the residential area was free of any radiological contamination because the item containing radium was found in the empty home.  Now, residents are concerned not only for radiation beneath their homes but also in the groundwater supply.

“In the event a radiological survey of a housing unit reveals a health concern, the Navy will take immediate action to protect the residents,” the Navy said in a statement.

New Mexico Nuclear Dump Has Second Radiation Leak

New air samples taken near the New Mexico nuclear storage facility where a leak had been detected after an underground fire now has a second leak of radiation.

Department of Energy officials confirmed that an elevated radiation reading was found outside the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, New Mexico on March 11th.

The leak comes less than a month after a Valentine’s Day leak contaminated 17 works and closed the facility to incoming waste.  The plant is the only storage site for nuclear waste from the country’s bomb program.

Officials say it’s likely the contamination in the air comes from previous radioactive deposits on the inside of exhaust ducts.  The low-level release of radiation is believed to happen on a rare basis but is what is called “well within safe limits.”

There has been no date offered for the opening of the plant after shipments were stopped following a fire on a truck hauling salt through the repository’s tunnels in February.

Fukushima Radiation To Reach West Coast in April

Scientists say that forecast models predict the first waves of low-level radiation from the 2011 Japan Tsunami and nuclear meltdown will begin to hit the U.S. West Coast during April.

Ken Buesseler, a chemical oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, presented a report to the issue last week saying that more monitoring is necessary now that radiation is starting to appear.

No federal agency is monitoring the Pacific Ocean for radiation levels.

“I’m not trying to be alarmist,” Buesseler said, “we can make predictions, we can do models, but unless you have results how will be know it’s safe.”

A report last week showed that Cesium 134 has been detected in the waters off Canada near the Gulf of Alaska.  Buesseler said that Cesium 134 is part of the release from the Fukushima nuclear plant.

“The models show it will reach north of Seattle first, then move down the coast,” Buesseler said.