Not a highway accident spill, this is an update on yet another Hanford site spillage:
The spill of highly radioactive waste beneath a building on the Hanford nuclear reservation north of Richland and near the Columbia River is both deeper and broader than anticipated.
In a statement Thursday, the Department of Energy said the contamination in the soil at the Hanford 324 Building 1,000 feet from the Columbia River and a mile north of Richland is “much larger” than previously identified.
Now the Department of Energy is rethinking the cleanup plan for the spill discovered 13 years ago, with work crews making preparations for the excavation of the radioactive material over the past six years.
The spill of cesium and strontium in the soil beneath the 324 Building is so radioactively hot that it would be lethal to a worker on direct contact within two minutes, DOE has said previously.
Apologies, by "yet another" I meant "just another" of the plethora of Hanford issues that still persist .. you're correct that there a very few new issues coming to light, I recall decades of stories of known issues being updated to reveal they're a bit a worse than earlier stated .. which is a by product of sending teams in to poke about and fix things I guess.
I'm absolutely sure they've thought of this, but I do wonder why they don't just divert the rivers around it and mine the entire place like an open-pit mine. Cart the square km or two of material off to some processing location and be done with it. It'd likely cost less than what's been spent already.
Again, I'm sure this has been thought of and rejected for a good reason. Still, doing it piecemeal doesn't seem to be working.
Open-pit mining produces dust, and in this case that dust would be heavily contaminated, and could then end up being blown away to contaminate some new site, making the problem worse.
> and mine the entire place like an open-pit mine.
That bit specifically evokes memories of choking clouds of dust having to be sprayed down to reduce the worst of it but still creating plumes of air borne particles spreading and settling over surrounding areas.
Now with the addition of post WWII nuclear weapons refining by products.
The current discharge of the Columbia River upstream of Richland is 118,000 ft3/s. That is a fifth of the Mississippi River. It is also quarter to half mile wide.
Once upon a time commenters here used to refrain. The “I’m sure they have thought” or “I have no experience but” or “Can anyone” is a reddit spillover. It’s not peak, this is post-peak decline unless we improve the discourse.
Also sarcasm and cynicism is cheap karma. It’s better to only comment constructively.
I say all this because you me and GP have been around here a while.
This “shut up so you seem smarter” attitude is so annoying, especially online. You are not allowed to be curious about something without becoming an expert on the subject. People too wrapped up in their own egos.
The Columbia River is massive - think the Siene, or Danube, or Rhine.
And the topology there is far from flat - it’s at the bottom of a valley. Trying to get that much water going anywhere it isn’t already going to go will require a project similar in scale to the Hoover Dam or California Aquaduct system.
It’s a bit like asking why we can’t ‘just’ build some walls to stop hurricanes from screwing over Florida. It sounds simple enough, right?
Those kind of questions themselves suck -- but generally here on HN the reply chain is interesting, and even such basic questions produce such interesting and sometimes 'expert' responses that I end up learning something from them.
so, I guess I mean to say that without the dumb questions I wouldn't get to enjoy the expert answers, so I appreciate them for that.
I guess the related question is - the half life of Cs137 and St90 are both about 30 years. Can the place just be secured well enough to prevent it from being disturbed for the next few hundred years? Why keep poking at it?
>I guess the related question is - the half life of Cs137 and St90 are both about 30 years.
Which is disturbing because this spill has been there for about 45 years already - it must have been as hot as hell to start with and you've got to wonder how many workers have been zapped by it over the years.
Someone should start combing through records and finding out who's been in near proximity.
My parents live in Richland. To get to my parents I drive past the Berkley Pit in Butte, MT, Anaconda's Smelter cleanup, Silverbow Creek cleanup, Clarkfork River cleanup, and the Milltown Dam cleanup supersites.
"the building currently is in a safe and stable configuration"
Just like they said all previous times.
First took them decades to 'discover' there had been 'accidents'. Then they 'just let it sit' for another 7 years, before being forced to do 'something' because the building was planned to be demolished. Then they try to jungle-rig together some contraptions that might scoop out the spill without too much cost
Then it takes them another 5 years to accidentaly stumble upon the spill not being so contained as they 'hoped'. But hey, trust them. This time they promise its all safe and stable. Once again.
This is the same comedy capers fly by night operations we see time and time again in each human endeavour. Yet somehow, the nuclear lobby wants us to believe they are exempt from human failty, despite being disproven time and time again.
Nuclear power might be great, but humankind just can't handle the responsabilities.
My guess, with a certain US Political Party cutting funding for things like the EPA and Super Fund Activities, I would guess no one had the funds to properly diagnose and do the appropriate cleanup.
So they decided it was good enough for "now" until this was discovered. I would say the Company that caused the spill will get away without paying cleanup costs. That is what usually happens with these type of Environmental Damage in the US.
It's actually the inverse - in the last 40 years this spill has been radiating away and getting less dangerous. However, for that period people have been exposed to it, and it's been sitting there as an accident waiting to happen if (for example) the site gets flooded.
There were a lot of people, companies, agencies, and policies that failed in the 737 Max debacle. It was a systemic failure and not some random, individual, isolated event.
My dad worked here in the late 1970s on the commercial reactor on-site (still operational, we lived in West Richland). This led to a lifelong career for him in the nuclear industry, but he died at 70 of bile duct cancer. There was a class action settlement from the DOE that we somehow auto-qualified for after his death since the cancer might have been related to his work there (but after Hanford he worked at plants in many different places, supposedly they had better standards).
This is, astonishingly, more cesium than Fukushima released. This must have been the entire inventory of multiple nuclear reactors accumulated over years.
- "In October 1986, a spill of a highly radioactive waste stream containing cesium (137Cs) and strontium (90Sr) occurred in the B-Cell of the 324 Building in the 300 Area of the Hanford Site. The spill is estimated to have contained approximately 1.3 million curies of radioactivity. An unknown fraction of this spill was lost to the subsurface through a leak in the sump in the floor of B-Cell."
It probably was - nuclear weapon fuel production and processing was mostly done at Hanford, and the things they’ve done to do it quickly and ‘easily’ have been pretty horrifying. Being able to classify everything has helped.
This is the site I always point to when the pro-nuc crowd likes to tout how safe nuclear energy is. Sure this is weapons, but I’d be a whole lot more confident in our ability to handle nuclear waste if we didn’t have a ~100 year old active ongoing nuclear disaster that we can’t manage to fix and we don’t even know the full extent of.
Once we demonstrate ability to clean this mess up, maybe then we might be able to trust ourselves with future nuclear projects.
I think that safety claims re: nuclear are a bit oversold by some, but when the alternative is increased deaths from particular emissions from burning fossil fuels I still find myself leaning nuclear.
e.g. Germany having decided to accelerate its nuclear powerplant shutdowns gets estimated (https://www.nber.org/papers/w26598) at leading to around 1100 additional deaths per year.
You also need to note that the same government at the same time decided to decelerate the growth of renewable energies that were supposed to replace both nuclear and fossil plants. It’s not a choice between nuclear and fossil.
The research that caused the spill was in support of nuclear power generation—for testing vitrification of spent nuclear fuel for geologic burial. From OP:
- "In the 1980s one of the building’s six hot cells was being used to prepare concentrated radioactive cesium and strontium from Hanford plutonium-production waste for Germany to use for testing of a repository for radioactive waste."
(And speaking generally, it's a type of work that's representative of closed nuclear fuel cycles: a type of work that'd you want to see a lot *more of*, if you want seriously to expand the nuclear fission economy. I'm no flavor of anti-nuclear; but let's not reflexively dismiss interesting discussions of technological risk—let's not fall into that polarization trap).
I think the reply was very clear that it's not a given that the way a research site handles nuclear waste would be the same way as an actual power plant
The same government is responsible for managing the nuclear waste at both of them, and they’ve clearly demonstrated they are unwilling and/or unable to do so.
I don’t support giving the government any more nuclear waste to manage until it can finish what is already on its plate, so to speak.
This site was used to create weapons-grade fuel, which has an order of magnitude more fissile isotopes than anything a civilian reactor uses. The dangers are not comparable
If the government is unwilling/unable to dedicate sufficient resources to clean up this 10x mess, why should we expect them to do so for a future 1x mess?
Where does that meme with mutations from radioactivity come from? Was it propaganda from the anti nuclear power lobby or has something like this actually been observed after the expossure to radiation?
Ater Chernobyl birth defects in humans significantly increased. Similar in animals. Usually those defects (not an expert,just my understanding) is in bad formation, rather than novel formations [eg, an arm fails to develop properly rather than developing a third arm]
radioactivity causes mutations in germ cell dna which causes more obviously mutated offspring, but just the same, enough radioactivity would change enough of your cells' dna to see something. it's just that it would probably be cancer and burns.
It goes back to at least the 50s, Japan had a thing for giant mutant monsters resulting from the bombs, Godzilla and all that fun stuff. I have never encountered anyone using mutants as a talking point for an anti-nuclear agenda.
There was quite a popular Austrian band who had some political songs, and one was about a man living near a nuclear power plant. Due do an accident at the power plant their son had six ears, mushrooms on the head, glowed in the dark, etc. That is the only example that I can come up with right now, but I have heard risk of mutations mentioned as a result of nuclear energy over and over again.
I am not willing to spend a lot of thime on this, but from first glance I can see that they are misusing a mutant deer from Georgia/US (1:10 into the video) for their narrative. Who knows if any of the images there are actually from Chernobyl.
And that video has 2.6 million views.
The images at the start are meant to shock and contrast the truths that they go on to explore, context is import. The rest of that video goes on to talk about how wildlife is now thriving in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, that the mutations can only be seen on the genetic level and that those mutations are part of what is allowing wildlife to thrive there. They are not using mutation as anti-nuclear propaganda, they are exploring much larger and more nuanced topics.
You really should have watched the video before posting instead of just finding some propaganda to repeat. I have no doubt you can find an example which will "prove" you right, but it will take you a fair amount of digging most likely and is about as common those heavily mutated births caused by radiation exposure.
And then it devolved into Hollywood genetics. You know, when something rewrites your genetic code and as a result you grow an extra head in a 30 second scene.
Not so long ago I read an excellent book, Plutopia [0], which went into detail about the development and management of Hanford. Alongside that story, it tells a parallel narrative about Ozersk -- a similarly polluted nuclear town in Russia. The book does an impressive job at building an intuition to the dangers of radioactive waste for non-technical readers. At the same time, it is not terribly uplifting to realize that environmental destruction was/is treated as an afterthought.
The Columbia passes north of Portland, and no water from the Columbia should flow down to it (since everything is draining out through the Columbia into the pacific), while Seattle is far enough away that it isn’t an issue. Vancouver WA is the only biggish (but not very big) city down stream from the tri-cities (plus lots of really pretty towns on the gorge).
The spill is 1000 feet away from the river so there isn’t any immediate danger yet. They’ll just dig it out probably?
Isn’t salmon usually caught in the ocean near the river’s mouth? The closer salmon get to spawning, the worse they taste. And it’s hard to get a large ship up the river. This seems like it would be more of an issue for trout fisherman, especially because trout are full time residents of the river.
We’re talking about a nuclear waste spill that is still just as dealy 40 years after it happened and none of you think the cesium from early life stages will still be there?
Fun fact I just learned: some salmon survive spawning. So a fraction of adult salmon could be re-exposed. Which is probably the more likely vector since childhood exposure is more time for symptoms to catch up with them.
We do eat a lot of Atlantic salmon here, it’s true, but we also eat named PNW salmon species like chinook, coho, steelhead trout, and at least some of those are indigenous to the Columbia.
The real problem with the columbia and salmon is that the columbia is becoming an unviable spawning ground. That entails a full collapse of the species in the region and any other species depending on salmon for food. Doesn't matter where you want to catch salmon if there are none to be caught.
Salmon aren’t allowed to be caught in the river barring treaty exceptions (so tribes can do it), also grizzly bears will eat salmon going up to spawn, but they aren’t a problem on the Columbia.
They've found that bears and birds can transport nitrogen from salmon over 100 miles from the river. If they can transport nitrogen that far they can transport cesium.
The columbia is a spawning ground, but it is spawning less than 10% what it used to. During the heat dome many salmon were getting burns on their body. The water level is too shallow to keep the water temps down. This is due to damming, irrigation, and water usage. Yakima is home to thousands of green lawns in the middle of the desert thanks to water rates where you can water an acre of lawn for hours a day, every day for super cheap.
Meanwhile, the entirety of the Puget sound, the water body right next to seattle has a bunch of salmon (seattle is a port town), rather than the columbia river that is 200 miles away.
"As that work began, contaminated soil was discovered in a wider area beneath the building, where it was not expected. DOE paused work in April, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the DOE national laboratory in Richland, was called upon to help Hanford officials understand the extent of the underground contamination. PNNL confirmed the findings of the Hanford contractors that the spill was both broader and deeper than thought when the plan to excavate it from within the hot cell was developed."
Eh, no? They basically said "oh shit this is a bigger problem let's re-evaluate" not "oh man we goofed but have a new plan".
"However, DOE said the building currently is in a safe and stable configuration. The contaminated soils at it have remained stable for decades, it said."
Except, they just learnt they were wrong about the contamination extent. I'm not sure how much I trust this evaluation to be correct. I would HOPE they are doing something like, using geiger counters with a groundwater well in a different location to check radiation levels. Another comment mentioned cesium and strontium, which at least cesium has a half life of 30 years, meaning if this spill happened 30-40 years ago a majority of the radiation may already have dissipated.
Shouldn't we be able to determine the age of the spill using the cesium half life?
Not a physicist, so you'll correct me if I'm wrong. The Cesium decay into something. So we could measure the concentration of the resulting atom compared to those of Cesium.
It’s decayed significantly into less radioactive elements in the mean time. As long as no one is playing in the dirt under the building, it’s actually not a bad place to leave it while it ‘cools’.
The spill was discovered 13 years ago, and happened even earlier, so we aren't sure how long this extremely toxic radioactive material (which is so toxic that can kill a person in 2 minutes) has been seeping into the soil and the ground water.
They're measuring the groundwater and there's no evidence of radiation in it yet. That it's been this way for 13 years means it's not going to suddenly reach groundwater now—it's just that they didn't realize how much there was in the immediate location of the spill.
No, the spill was discovered 13 years ago, but it happened even earlier. The article doesn't say when the spill from the 58-year-old building happened, just that it was detected 13 years ago. To me, the fact that an untold number of year passed before this massive, highly radioactive spill was detected, and the further fact that it took them 13 years to figure out how bad the spill was, doesn't inspire confidence that they have a full handle on the situation and have accurately measured just how widespread the contamination is.
The article did indicate that there was work being done in the 80’s during which the floor of a “hot cell” was damaged and allowed the radioactive material to leak out into the soil.
>Radioactivity in the contaminated soil has been measured at 8,900 rad per hour.
Ah, Gell-Mann amnesia, how I forget thee.
The rad is a unit of radiation exposure, or "dose"; it measures how much radiation impacted a target (such as you). The appropriate way to characterize radiation in soil would be curies (properly terabecquerels, but we still use curies because of course we do) per kilogram. This is a material property, while the radiation "dose" is a function of distance (and angular position -- a "geometry" factor).
However, it does correctly correspond to the stated risk to personnel. 8900 rad per hour would indeed deliver a lethal dose of radiation within a few minutes.
This isn't that egregious. I mean, yes, you're technically correct, but it's easy to mentally translate "radioactivity in the contaminated soil..." to "the radioactivity in the contaminated soil is such that it would deliver 8,900 rad/hour to a worker standing in its vicinity" (or something along those lines). It's entirely understandable that the reporters didn't go through whatever awkward and pedantic phrasing they technically should have.
And while Ci is technically the right measurement for "amount of radioactivity", that's not a measurement that's useful for general consumption. Giving the expected dose and dimensions of the contaminated soil is vastly more effective at communicating the severity of the contamination.
So, what happened here? What kind of spill happened? There's such little public info easily available about this it seems, but maybe I'm just bad at searching late at night.
That's almost all focusing on how to clean it up and the current state of it. Very little about why it got to the state its in. I'm asking why is it in the state its in.
> Research activities in B-Cell included test projects for waste vitrification (the transformation of a substance into glass) and grouting methods for stabilizing highly radioactive materials. A report by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in 1993 referenced a large spill of concentrated cesium and strontium into the cell. Other smaller spills also have occurred.
> a visible breach was identified in the stainless steel liner at the floor of the sump, which is believed to have occurred at some point in the past operation of the facility. Some contaminated material might have historically leaked through the breached liner and concrete floor through corrosion or by following an expansion joint or crack in the concrete floor slab.
> A report by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in 1993 referenced a large spill of concentrated cesium and strontium into the cell. Other smaller spills also have occurred.
This sounds like the report I'm actually asking for.
But like why was there all this radioactive stuff all over the floor all these years? That's my real question. What actually happened in this room? Why was there all this stuff going down a sump?
> the 324 Building operated from 1966 to 1996 and supported research on highly radioactive materials.
There are many possible research activities that take under fume hoods in chemistry labs and hot cells in radiation labs.
At Hanford scientists were interested in both charting the radioactive decay breakdowns and half lives of elements ( a huge tree of branches and possibilities ) and in weapons development - studying the properties of various clumps of matter wrt how well they absorbed particles, emmitted particles, focused particles, etc.
When (for example) milling a disc of material, there will be waste, when using beakers, they will be flushed and washed out .. all this leads to material going down a drain and into a holding sump.
Ideally the sumps are cleaned out, even when hazardous, but eventually many sumps will crack and leak material.
Several Hanford sumps leaked - as did multitudes of Hanford waste barrels.
People were pretty much learning and developing procedures on the flay in these early days of atomic fever.
Hanford housed the first plutonium reactor in the world, that created the plutonium for the first atomic bomb at Trinity and the "Fat Man" bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. It expanded to 9 nuclear reactors and 5 plutonium processing facilities during the Cold War and produced most of the plutonium for the 60,000 weapons in the US nuclear arsenal. Because of poor safety procedures and waste disposal practices the site is a $500B dollar cleanup disaster (and costs might continue to increase well beyond that).
Not Hanford, but in 1958 a radiation excursion happened at Y-12, and in that case, it was storage drums that had corroded, so the bottom came off. That's just one example of how this stuff can get in the floor.
Seems like they were doing some work in there, and some stuff spilled. They probably cleaned it up, and then discovered a crack some of the spilled stuff leaked through?
Only slightly. People working remotely through the "hot cell". Somehow the floor was broken? What's a hot cell? Why was the floor I guess flooded with this stuff? It's pretty vague on details, maybe someone who already knows a lot about what would have been happening would fill in these gaps but it seems unclear to me.
And even then the most detailed explanation in all the links given above just mention some sump that had a crack in it or something. It still doesn't actually describe what was going on one the "hot cell" that led to leaks. Someone tip over a drum of nasty stuff? They washing exposed stuff in there? Not a lot of actual details on what went on in there.
There's no "on October 2nd 1983 operator John Smith actuated the robotic arm incorrectly knocking over the canister of strontium..."
I wouldn't expect details of nuclear enrichment and refinement techniques to be published publicly, just vague bits like saying which elements they were working with.
Hanford is the result of decades of "John Smiths" doing inadequate nuclear waste disposal. The event that happened was that we were in a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union and nobody really knew or cared about the externalities of what they were doing.
Interesting how fake stories about Chinese balloons can linger in US media for weeks, fuelling racist ideologies, while actually vital stories like this are almost completely censored out of the public eye. There's the us-vs-them mentality, then there's the repeatedly shooting oneself in the foot and blaming others mentality.
It’s not racist to assume giant ballon structures sent over your secure sites by a country with 500 nuclear weapons pointed at you and a whole military complex devoted to war with you, might be spying. It’s pretty crazy to just assume they aren’t.
- "A whole military complex devoted to war with you"
This is peak western propaganda.
We literally have a massive naval presence conducting the world's largest military exercises off their coast, practicing invading them in the South China Sea and ROK - a state that wouldn't exist had we not invaded china's ally the DPRK, leveling their cities, killing 1/5 the population, installing a dictator, and maintaining full operational control of their military in the event that we decide to invade them again or invade China.
On top of that we've got tons of strategic military installations surrounding them, we even spent trillions and sent our people to die for more strategic advantage in Afghanistan. The US has shown that we're the real aggressors time and time again with the media's constant hostile rhetoric, and the very real military conquests we've conducted around the world, killing millions, overthrowing or assassinating democratically elected leaders, and installing dictators in countless nations across the globe.
Swap the names for 10 seconds, substitute Korea for Mexico, China has fleets in the Caribbean and bases in Canada, they conduct the world's largest exercise in the gulf practicing how to war with and invade the US, they've successfully toppled countless governments and popular uprisings. And now they're saying your weather balloon is a spy balloon and your country's military is devoted to war with them.
Look at the historical context, and you'll realize how hypocritical and obvious the US's hostility, fear mongering, and propaganda towards China is. It's seriously the same rinse and repeat recipe we've used for every one of our thinly veiled imperialist conquests.
I would argue that quite the opposite is the case. I'm sorry we disagree on such a basic level. My argument: weather balloons exist and have for decades; US authorities knew right away there was no spying equipment,because they had access to the craft, and mislead the public; US authorities lied about the weather balloon flying directly above an important US military base; the pentagon just admitted there was no spying equipment; we are also now ignoring the 5 other incidents of accusations of spying-by-balloon and shooting down of objects that followed.
I just reread your comment. You believe China has a "whole military complex devoted to war with the US". I would be very interested in where you got these ideas?
I must have missed the fake stories. I just saw the ones about a school bus sized metal structure hovering over the US sent by China, endangering people below it.
Yes, I have just searched through CNNs archives. Apparently CNN has never accused China of using balloons to spy on the US. Apparently we were always at war with Eurasia.
>The bottom of the cell is about 42 feet above groundwater.
>PNNL confirmed the findings of the Hanford contractors that the spill was both broader and deeper than thought when the plan to excavate it from within the hot cell was developed.
Not a comforting thought. I hope they are actually monitoring groundwater radiation levels.
Wait is this the same spill they discovered about 13 years ago which happened in the 80's ? The head line made it look like something new happen and got scared for a second
My dad’s contract with Westinghouse at Hanford ended in 1980 or 1981 (definitely he was not there in 1982). He got contracts in New Jersey, Louisiana, Michigan, but was unemployed for a year when the entire nuclear industry imploded in 1985-86 because they stopped building new nuclear power plants. He eventually got an FTE job in Mississippi of all places, and the pay was much lower than we were used to (also our family declared chapter 7 bankruptcy because of the unemployment leading to a house that got foreclosed).
Don’t go into nuclear engineering if you want a good job in a nice location (they never build nuke plants in nice places!). The only places providing nuclear engineers are the navy and overseas (universities got rid of the NE programs in the 90s), it isn’t considered a nice job, and the pay is just so so (unless you are contracting, but then your job isn’t stable). Also kids if you do good on your ASVAB, and a Navy recruiter wants you to sign up to be a nuke, just say no unless you really really want to do it.
Tell me how Grand Gulf nuclear power station makes Port Gibson MS a nice place to live (my dad took a 1.5 hour commute to live in Vicksburg instead)? Honestly, the nicest place we ever lived was the Tri cities when my dad worked at Hanford.
Ah, but then stil disagree. These places would be bad with or without the plants, it’s just a matter of more or less jobs. The plants themselves don’t pollute like coal plants do, and are on large park-like plots of land.
Hanford is unique because it was a DOE site, and..well, it’s all scrub out there (but now they have vineyards and wine), which I just find more appealing.
Where are all the people that say nuclear energy is cheap, totally safe and fool proof except for one time having an unsafe design or another time building it on a shore for water access or building it in the future war zone or …?
In the 1980s one of the building’s six hot cells was being used to prepare concentrated radioactive cesium and strontium from Hanford plutonium-production waste for Germany to use for testing of a repository for radioactive waste.
Hanford was used for weapons manufacturing, but the research project was on nuclear energy (Germany never had a nuclear weapons program).
This isn't good, but it's an old spill, and not even one we just learned about. And, it doesn't change the fact that nuclear energy is without doubt incredibly safe, nor the likelihood that our world would be better off today if we weren't so irrationally scared by it, or so unforgiveably willing to overlook the millions of deaths from fossil fuel pollution every year.
Nuclear weapons fuel (what this site was producing) is far more dangerous than what civilian reactors use, as it contains an order of magnitude more fissile isotopes. The vast majority of nuclear accidents have been military, not civilian.
