The Legacy of Hanford

One era's triumph can turn into another era's disaster, and perhaps no better example of that in the field of nuclear energy and weapons is the Hanford Site in south-central Washington State, about 200 miles from Seattle.  During the height of World War II, physicist Enrico Fermi designed a nuclear reactor for the Dupont Corporation to produce plutonium that was needed for nuclear weapons, as part of the ultra-secret Manhattan Project.  The small farming community of Hanford, Washington was selected for the site of the reactor and associated chemical processing plants, and more than 40,000 construction workers swarmed to the bank of the Columbia River in 1943 to build what became known after the war as the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. 

Because plutonium is one of the most deadly radioactive substances known, plant designers had to come up with novel ways of transporting large volumes of liquid and solid plutonium-containing material while keeping workers either far away from the load or behind several feet of radiation shielding.  Accordingly, one of the first industrial applications of closed-circuit TV was to view remote-controlled plutonium-handling equipment.  In view of the hazards of spills during transportation from the producing reactors to the processing plant, a railway tunnel was constructed of timbers and steel, buried in a foot or more of earth on top.  Plutonium that went into the "Fat Man" nuclear bomb used on Nagasaki, Japan probably passed through this tunnel, as did dozens of tons of plutonium used to make nuclear weapons during the Cold War.

Beginning in the 1960s, plutonium production ceased at Hanford, as it was realized that the site was heavily contaminated with long-lasting radioactive material and was no longer usable by then-current safety standards.  When the U. S. populace felt its back was to the wall during the war, not many people raised issues about long-term health hazards of working with nuclear weapons.  But as the threat of nuclear war declined after the Partial Test Ban Treaty between the USSR and the US in 1963, and especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, most production activity ceased at Hanford and instead, a massive cleanup became the top priority.  The U. S. Department of Energy now spends billions of dollars a year on the Hanford cleanup, employing 8,000 people at the site and taking reasonable precautions about keeping workers safe.  But since President Trump's appointment of former Texas governor Rick Perry to head the Department of Energy, the media has paid more attention to the Department and any problems it may have, the most recent of which is the collapse of part of the roof of the old railroad tunnel used to transport plutonium.

The hole in the tunnel, more than ten feet across, was discovered on May 9, and as a precaution, many employees at the site were told to shelter in place until measurements could be taken to tell if substantial amounts of radioactive material had been released.  Investigation showed that no such release occurred, and the hole has since been covered in plastic and plans made to fill the old tunnel with grout.  Several railroad cars used to transport plutonium remain in the tunnel, which is altogether too radioactive to be inspected by humans, although robotic inspections are possible.  A second larger tunnel built in the 1950s has also shown signs of structural instability, and Hanford managers are planning to do something about preventing its collapse by August.

It would be nice if engineering ethics consisted of a set of unchanging rules, and doing engineering ethically simply meant understanding and following the rules.  But a phrase I recently came across expresses nicely the difference between the discipline of ethics and the disciplines of the hard sciences. 

Ethics is a "humane science"—meaning not that it's kind to animals, but that its "laws" are really just generalizations that depend on the nature of humanity, and so cannot show the ironclad reliability and constancy of physical laws.  This is not to argue for relativism—the notion that all ethical principles are relative to particular times, places, and cultures.  Rather, it is to confess both ignorance—no finite human being can possibly know all the relevant considerations in a particular ethical situation—and the fact that as human cultures and societies change, what is regarded as ethical behavior in a given circumstance can also change. 

In the case of Hanford, what has changed the most is our sense of priorities.  In 1939, the U. S. suspected Hitler of building a nuclear weapon, and Japanese troops were showing signs of fighting to the last man on the last domestic island of that nation.  For good or ill (plenty of both, actually), Roosevelt gave the green light to the Manhattan Project, which led to the first production and use of nuclear weapons six years later.  Both leaders and ordinary citizens felt seriously that the U. S. was fighting for its life, and in such a situation, concerns about exposures to levels of radiation that might possibly lead to cancer in twenty or thirty years, or might pollute the environment for hundreds of years, simply faded into the background.

Having enjoyed relative peace in the North American continent ever since the end of World War II, the U. S. can now afford to deal with the messes it created during the war, Hanford being the leading example.  Many opponents of nuclear power take the acres of lethal radioactivity at Hanford to be proof sufficient to lead us to swear off all use of nuclear power forever, amen.  And it must be admitted that disasters such as the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear-reactor fire in Ukraine are uniquely horrible.  Shutting down all nuclear plants would presumably avoid such incidents in the future. 

But nuclear energy is also uniquely suited to address the increasingly prominent issue of global warming.  While it is an open question whether renewable energy can compete economically with nuclear energy for the world's short-term energy needs, it would be shortsighted to rule nuclear out altogether because of an emotional reaction against it not based on an objective view of the facts.  Unfortunately, there are lots of facts to view, and so nuclear power remains controversial, as it probably always will simply because its first public use was to bring us the horrors of nuclear war. 

Sources:  I referred to news reports on the Hanford tunnel-roof collapse carried by the Washington Post on May 9 at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/05/09/tunnel-collapses-at-hanford-nuclear-waste-site-in-washington-state-reports-say/, and the Seattle Times on June 30 at http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/another-hanford-tunnel-storing-radioactive-waste-at-risk-study-finds/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on the Hanford Site. 

A Close Shave With Plutonium Foam

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.