nuclear-news

Whistleblower on dangers at Hanford nuclear waste facility

During her testimony to the board she gave different answers than top-level officials with the Department of Energy and contractors Bechtel National and URS. Afterward, she says her managers asked her to change her answers. Busche said “No.”

She says she was … “Raised by a very good mother, that said, ‘Just don’t lie. ‘Cause once you tell your first one it’s real hard to … they just continue to grow.’”…

Audio http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=145326474&ft=3&f=145326474  Hanford Nuclear Safety Manager Questions Waste Treatment Plant NPR by ANNA KING  January 17, 2012 from N3 RICHLAND, Wash. – Waste in underground tanks at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation may have much more plutonium than previously thought. That’s according to a report by a Hanford contractor that’s just been leaked to public radio. It’s also according to the latest high profile whistleblower to raise serious concerns about a waste treatment plant being built at the Nuclear Reservation in southeast Washington.

Here is why you should care about what Donna Busche says. She told me she’s the manager for environmental and nuclear safety at Hanford’s waste treatment plant.

“I’m where the nuclear safety buck stops,” Busche says.

And Busche wants a well-working plant.

“I believe the waste treatment plant is needed. We need to get the waste out of the tanks, we have to. Right? They are in degraded state they are long past their life cycle,” Busche says.

What that means is that those tanks near the Columbia River are in danger of leaking more radioactive sludge into the ground, or worse, one could rupture.

The waste treatment plant is a massive complex of buildings all meant to separate, mix and ready that radioactive sludge before it’s turned into glass logs for long term storage.

But here’s the thing: Busche says there are serious engineering problems with that process that haven’t been figured out yet. And the longer those sticky issues go unsolved, the more expensive it will be to fix them.

“We continue to build it even with these big, huge lingering issues”, say says. “Like:

*Is criticality safety a concern?….

Here are some of Busche’s main concerns:

Hanford engineers have recently revised their estimates for how much plutonium is in the nuclear site’s sludge. Listen to these numbers: Hanford engineers used to think they had 10 kilograms of plutonium in the tanks. They now believe they’ve got between 30 and 130 kilograms. Let’s put that in perspective: The nuclear bomb at Nagasaki had about 6 kilograms of plutonium. In the worst case scenario Busche says Hanford could have 13 times more plutonium than previously thought.

“Since day one of the project, many years before I got here, the project has designed the plant assuming criticality was incredible. Which means criticality it would never happen, never,” Busche says.

A criticality is when radioactive atoms release a burst of energy……
Here’s another of Busche’s concerns: That radioactive sludge can create hydrogen gas. If it builds up in a closed space it can blow up. And Busche worries the plant’s complex system of pipes isn’t robust enough to withstand hydrogen explosions. And once the plant starts working, it’s not like you can go in and fix those pipes.

“You have to remember that in this plant we are building vessels in black cells. Which means once we shut that door, we are never going back in there,” Busche says.

The plant’s black cells are where the waste is pretreated and processed, and they will be so radioactively hot that they’re impossible to enter. Imagine fixing a leaky kitchen sink without opening the kitchen cabinets.
Busche raised her concerns to her supervisors, and to their supervisors.   She even testified at amajor two-day hearing of the national Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board in 2010.

During her testimony to the board she gave different answers than top-level officials with the Department of Energy and contractors Bechtel National and URS. Afterward, she says her managers asked her to change her answers. Busche said “No.”

She says she was … “Raised by a very good mother, that said, ‘Just don’t lie. ‘Cause once you tell your first one it’s real hard to … they just continue to grow.’”…

January 18, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | - plutonium, Reference, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA