Plutonium is nasty stuff. It's highly radioactive, so breathing
plutonium dust is not a good way to live to a ripe old age. And did I mention it's an essential
ingredient in most thermonuclear weapons?
For these and many other reasons, nuclear waste contaminated with
plutonium is not something you just toss in the ordinary trash can. That is why, at great trouble and
expense, the U. S. Department of Energy built the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
(WIPP) about fifteen years ago, a few miles outside Carlsbad, New Mexico. It is the nation's only federally
operated "permanent" disposal facility for nuclear waste. I put permanent in quotes, because,
well, something that happened last Valentine's Day showed that so far, putting
stuff there is anything but permanent storage.
WIPP is in a salt mine, but salt
happens to be a byproduct. The
reason WIPP was constructed in the middle of a large salt deposit is that over
geological time scales, salt acts more like Silly Putty than rock—it bends and
flows instead of breaking, and seals any cracks that might develop. So the scientists and engineers who
designed WIPP chose to site it thousands of feet underground in a salt deposit
so that even after 10,000 years, underground water would be unlikely to
penetrate to the still-radioactive byproducts of nuclear-weapons manufacturing,
which comes from a number of national labs dating all the way back to World War
II. And for most of the facility's
history, things went more or less according to plan. After they dug tunnels in the salt and opened up an area the
size of several soccer fields, they began filling the space with 55-gallon
drums full of nuclear waste from places like Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory and
elsewhere.
Then, on the night of Feb. 14,
2014, when no one was actually underground but some monitoring personnel were
standing their watches on the surface, a radiation alarm went off alerting
technicians to high levels of radioactivity underground. The expert who knew what to do about
such an alarm was not on duty.
They tried to contact this person, without success. This went on till early on the morning
of Feb. 15, when some workers began to suspect that the radiation released
underground might be coming up through the ventilation system to the
surface. After trying to change
some ventilation filters, managers finally ordered the WIPP personnel to go to
a safe location, but by that time they had been exposed to low levels of
radiation, as a later investigation showed.
What happened? According to a recent report in the Los Angeles Times, one of the drums
stored underground spontaneously ruptured, spewing out several cubic feet of
white foam laced with plutonium.
Some of the foam or vapor from it got into the ventilation system that
exchanges air between the underground rooms and the surface. This system had radiation detectors,
and in the event of a release of radioactive material, it was supposed to
divert the ventilation air to filters that would catch all radioactive
particles. But the dampers
assigned to do this leaked, and lots of contaminated air got to the surface
anyway. Over six months later,
WIPP is still in a partial-shutdown mode, and estimates of what it will take to
restore it to safe operation range up to $100 million or more.
Opinions on the propriety of
nuclear technology range all the way from "no way, José" to
"nuclear energy is our best weapon against global warming" and
everywhere in between. Dead-set
opponents of nuclear energy will see in the WIPP accident evidence that plans
to keep nuclear waste safe for thousands of years in an underground facility
have now been revealed to be a sorry joke. The disabling of WIPP for receiving nuclear waste has not
only put the whole idea of underground disposal into doubt, but has also caused
a chain reaction (so to speak) of delays in cleanups of nuclear labs around the
U. S.
For those who still believe
nuclear energy is a good long-term option for our future energy needs, the WIPP
accident shows how even the best-laid plans can be upset by a failure of management
integrity. Even now, no one knows
exactly what happened chemically inside that drum to cause it to rupture. Investigations have revealed lapses in
the procedures used to transfer information about each drum's contents to WIPP
operators. In other words, WIPP
managers are not sure what went into that drum in the first place, so they
don't have a basis for duplicating it and maybe finding out how to prevent
other similar ruptures. Finding
one rattlesnake just hatching out of an egg strongly motivates you to wonder
where the other eggs are, and the WIPP people may be sitting on dozens of
plutonium rattlesnake eggs. And
you thought you had problems.
All this talk about 10,000-year
lifetimes makes me wonder what will be left of our own civilization even a
thousand years from now. Egypt has
its pyramids, Greece has its temples, and maybe all we'll have is WIPP?
A few days ago, a relative of
mine sent me a video of the opening of a time capsule that was buried only
fifty years ago, in 1964, at the founding of a bank in Fort Worth, Texas, where
my father used to work. Whoever
designed that time capsule did a good job: along with the perishable newsprint and film reels, they packed
a sock full of desiccator and sealed the whole thing with an air-tight lead seal. As a result, the stuff inside looked
like it had just been put on the shelf yesterday.
A 50-year time capsule is a far
stretch from a 10,000-year nuclear waste repository. But when we are talking about stuff that could kill anyone
it touches, the highest standards of engineering and safety must be followed,
from the minute that hazardous waste reaches WIPP to the end of the 10,000-year
warranty period. There will be
pleas for more money for WIPP as a result of this accident, but money isn't the
only answer.
Money can't buy integrity, and
money alone can't bring into being a cadre of dedicated individuals to whom
their duty with regard to safety is their highest calling. About the only place in government you
can find this attitude consistently these days is in the military. I'm not saying we should call in the
Marines to take over WIPP. But if
they did, I bet you wouldn't have any more twelve-hour delays between the time
an alarm went off and the time appropriate actions were taken.
Sources: One of the first reports of the WIPP
accident was carried by National Public Radio at http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/02/28/283773449/13-workers-exposed-to-radiation-at-n-m-nuclear-waste-dump. The most detailed news report I have
found was from the Los Angeles Times, which published it online on Aug.
23 at http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-nuclear-waste-accident-20140824-story.html. I also referred to the Wikipedia
articles on "Waste Isolation Pilot Plant" and "Plutonium." For those interested, the opening of
the 50-year time capsule at the former City National Bank is described in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram at http://www.star-telegram.com/2014/08/27/6072685/banks-50-year-old-time-capsule.html.
No comments:
Post a Comment