Nuclear safety board warns of trouble ahead at Hanford, but could lose role under Trump
An unfinished $16.8 billion complex to treat chemical and radioactive waste at the Hanford site in Central Washington continues to have problems that risk explosions and radioactive releases from unintended nuclear reactions, according to a Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board report.
The board’s findings are at odds with a much more optimistic assessment offered by the U.S. Energy Department of the efforts to treat the toxic leftovers of decades of atomic weapons production. In a written statement last February, the Energy Department said major problems previously identified by the safety board had been “resolved,” and found that design work could resume on what the department calls a critical pre-treatment plant needed to process highly radioactive waste.
The latest report is more sobering news for a project conceived more than two decades ago whose costs have increased significantly and has had repeated delays because of safety concerns.
The report’s release comes at a difficult time for the board. The Trump administration is considering a proposal to downsize or abolish the board, which for nearly 30 years has provided independent oversight of defense nuclear sites across the country. The board’s backers say this report — challenging Energy Department assumptions — is more evidence of its vital review role.
“They don’t want to hear what the board has to say, but they absolutely need to,” said Dirk Dunning, a retired Oregon Department of Energy engineer who worked on Hanford issues for more than 20 years.
The board has been deeply involved in keeping watch over the development of Hanford’s waste-treatment complex, the largest of its kind in the world, on which ground was broken in 2002 on 65 acres of the nuclear reservation. The goal is to transform 56 million gallons of chemical and radioactive waste into glass rods that can be safely put into long-term storage. The process requires a hugely complex engineering effort because in part to the wide range of waste materials stored in 177 underground tanks, more than a third of which have leaked over the years.
But safety concerns, including those cited in the latest board report, have plagued the pre-treatment facility for years even as billions of dollars have been budgeted for engineering, labor, equipment and other costs.
“There are all the same issues and they still haven’t been addressed,” said Tom Carpenter, executive director of Hanford Challenge, a public interest group that has advocated for whistleblowers, workers and accountability during the cleanup.
An Energy Department spokeswoman at Hanford’s Office of River Protection said the board’s analysis will be taken into consideration when design work resumes. But it still is unclear when that may happen.
The spokeswoman, Yvonne Levardi, said that when the Energy Department determines that a plant problem has been resolved, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is fixed but that enough progress has been made to resume design work.
During World War II, Hanford was claimed by the federal government as a secret site for producing plutonium that was used in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Nine reactors would eventually operate at Hanford, with the last one shut down in 1987.
The pre-treatment plant has long been designated as a key part of the cleanup. It will concentrate, and then filter out solid high-level radioactive waste that is some of the most challenging material stored in the tanks.
When completed, the pre-treatment plant is designed to contain more than 100 miles of piping and four huge stainless-steel tanks — each able to hold 375,000 gallons of waste — that will sit behind steel-laced concrete walls that workers cannot access.
The project is being run by Bechtel National, the lead contractor. By 2010, whistleblowers and the federal safety board had raised concerns over the risks of explosions from the buildup of hydrogen gas in the pipes and the potential for radioactive releases from unintended nuclear chain reactions, known as criticality hazards.
The design challenges have prompted a workaround to process what’s known as low-activity waste — material containing small concentrations of radionuclides requiring less protection for public health than highly radioactive waste. That work is expected to begin by 2022. But the deadline to open the pre-treatment facility has been pushed until 2036. It is intended to handle all waste, including highly radioactive material, such as spent fuel from nuclear reactors.
Some skeptics question whether the pre-treatment plant will eventually be abandoned in favor of alternative technologies.
“It is a massive project, and a lot of very serious issues have to be worked out before it can operate,” said Rick Schapira, a former deputy general counsel for the board. “If they can’t be addressed, you have to look to other ways to treat the waste.”
But the Energy Department statement released in February called resolution of the pre-treatment plant issues “critically important” to the overall mission. It said that the department had confirmed design, process changes and safety controls to address the potential for criticality and hydrogen buildups in pipes and vessels that posed an explosion risk.
“I could not be prouder of our … technical and nuclear safety teams for their focus and commitment to resolve these technical issues,” Bill Hamel, the assistant project manager for Hanford’s waste treatment plant, said in the statement.
The board’s review of that work was completed in June, and delivered Oct. 12 to James Owendoff, an acting assistant energy secretary. It is unclear why the board waited more than three months to formally deliver the report. A board spokeswoman did not return a reporter’s phone calls seeking comment for this story.
The board report cites 14 remaining problems. They range from a mixing system that may not operate reliably to a “lack of sufficient technical rigor” in safety assumptions required to handle heavy plutonium particles that pose a risk of criticality.
Washington state’s Department of Ecology also monitors Hanford.
Dan McDonald, a state project manager, had not seen the latest report until a reporter sent it to him. He did not dispute the board’s findings but said that he feels that significant progress has been made toward resolving the problems at the pre-treatment plant.
“Nothing in this report is new business for me,” McDonald said.
The Hanford report is the kind of tough-edged review that has long characterized the board’s work. But the board now faces critics, some from within its own ranks, who call for an end to these independent reviews.
In a June 29 letter to the Office of Management and Budget, safety board chairman Sean Sullivan called the board “a relic of the Cold War-era defense establishment” that is no longer needed by an Energy Department that has developed its own internal regulation. News of the letter was first reported last month by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative organization based in Washington, D.C.
Sullivan is one of five board members who serve five-year terms. They are backed by a professional staff of more than 100 able to dive into the formidable challenges of the federal nuclear-weapons sites.
The board members are appointed by the president, with no more than three members of any one party able to serve at the same time. President Barack Obama named Sullivan — a Republican attorney and retired Navy submarine officer — to the board in 2012. President Donald Trump appointed him chairman in January.
The board has no regulatory powers to require the Energy Department to take action. But its reports are made public and the Energy Department is required to respond to the panel’s formal recommendations.
The board also has provided an important forum for whistleblowers when they found that Energy Department and contractors ignored their concerns.
In 2011, the board — in response to whistleblower allegations — released a harsh assessment of a “failed safety culture” at the Hanford waste-treatment complex. The board found that technical objections were “discouraged, if not opposed or rejected without review.” This had a “substantial probability” of jeopardizing the project mission, the report found.
Schapira, the former board deputy general counsel, participated in the Hanford whistleblower investigation. He said that report was an important document that led to a broader review of the Energy Department’s safety culture at other nuclear sites.
Schapira, who retired from the board in 2013, said it also triggered a “buzz saw of opposition” from contractors who have pushed Congress to revise the board statutes. Those critics now appear to have an ally in Sullivan who, in keeping with Trump’s goal of downsizing the executive branch, suggested that the board be shut down, folded into the Energy Department or reduced in size.
“It’s a pretty shocking letter,” Schapira said, referring to the June letter. “One could construe from it that he was appointed to undo the board.”
The board also is facing pressure from the Energy Department to change how it does business.
In an Oct. 13 meeting with board members, Energy Department Undersecretary Frank Klotz recommended ending public disclosure of weekly and monthly accounts of safety issues at federal facilities, according to a report by the Center for Investigative Reporting.
The center reported that board members briefly circulated a proposal to accommodate Klotz’s request, and then dropped it from consideration.
Schapira, who stays in touch with former colleagues, said professional staff members are frustrated by what they view as the politicalization of the board and the increasing difficulty of addressing technical problems that some board members don’t want to hear about.
“A number of them are very demoralized,” Schapira said.
The Fukushima Cleanup Is Progressing, But at a Painstaking Pace
Earlier this year, remotely piloted robots transmitted what officials believe was a direct view of melted radioactive fuel inside Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant’s destroyed reactors—a major discovery, but one that took a long and painful six years to achieve. In the meantime, the program to clean up the destroyed reactors has seen numerous setbacks and concerns, including delays on Japanese electrical utility Tepco’s timetable to begin removing the highly radioactive fuel and continued leakage of small amounts of radioactive substances.
Japanese officials are now hoping that they can convince a skeptical public that the worst of the disaster is over, the New York Times reported, but it’s not clear whether it’s too late despite the deployment of 7,000 workers and massive resources to return the region to something approaching normal. Per the Times, officials admit the recovery plan—involving the complete destruction of the plant, rather than simply building a concrete sarcophagus around it as the Russians did in Chernobyl—will take decades and tens of billions of dollars. Currently, Tepco plans to begin removing waste from one of the three contaminated reactors at the plant by 2021, “though they have yet to choose which one.”
“Until now, we didn’t know exactly where the fuel was, or what it looked like,” Tepco manager Takahiro Kimoto told the Times. “Now that we have seen it, we can make plans to retrieve it.”
“They are being very methodical—too slow, some would say—in making a careful effort to avoid any missteps or nasty surprises,” Union of Concerned Scientists nuclear safety director David Lochbaum added. “They want to regain trust. They have learned that trust can be lost much quicker than it can be recovered.”
Currently, radiation levels are so high in the ruined facility that it fries robots sent in within a matter of hours, which will necessitate developing a new generation of droids with even higher radiation tolerances. Authorities have built a crane on the roof of one melted-down reactor, unit No. 3, to remove fuel, Phys.org reported, though it will not actually be in use until at least April 2018. Disposal of low level waste such as “rice straw, sludge and ash from waste incineration” has only just begun, the Japan Times wrote. The eventual disposal of more dangerous waste will be much more difficult.
At the same time, criticism of the government’s approach is also mounting with concerns it is pressuring residents to return to an area where radiation exposure remains many times the international standard.
https://gizmodo.com/the-fukushima-cleanup-is-progressing-but-at-a-painstak-1820587597
GE sued for Fukushima disaster
Lawsuit alleges unsafe design, cost cutting
Japanese property owners and businesses near the Fukushima nuclear plant that melted down after a devastating 2011 tsunami filed a $500 million class-action lawsuit against General Electric for negligently designing the doomed plant.
The lawsuit, filed yesterday in federal court in Boston, claims the explosions and release of radioactive material at the Fukushima reactors — likely the most costly industrial accident in history at $200 billion — were caused by GE’s unsafe design of the reactors and further efforts to cut costs that also undercut safety during the construction of the plant.
As a result, the area around Fukushima, according to the lawsuit, became a “ghost town.”
“There are no people. Roads are guarded by men in hazmat suits. And no one will ever live there again,” the lawsuit said.
GE said in a statement it became aware of the lawsuit today and is “thoroughly reviewing the matter.”
The company pushed into the nuclear industry in the 1960s and offered a “cheap reactor … with a significantly smaller, but less safe containment than industry standard” that safety experts repeatedly raised concerns about, the lawsuit said.
GE designed all six reactors at Fukushima — building two on site and advising on the construction of the rest. Original designs for the power plant called for it to be built near a bluff 115 feet above sea level. But GE — to save money — lowered the bluff to 80 feet, court papers say, “dramatically increasing the flood risk.”
Backup systems in the event of a problem at the nuclear plant were also woefully lacking, causing the cooling system to fail, the suit states.
All this was done in an earthquake-prone region, the Japanese residents and business owners say. Fukushima was built on a 13-foot bluff with a plan to handle 101⁄2-foot waves, the lawsuit said.
The March 2011 earthquake that crippled the power plant unleashed a 45-foot tsunami.
The lawsuit follows the conclusion of two others this year in Japan against the power plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. and the government, resulting in payouts of $335,000 and $4.4 million for residents who were forced from their homes.
http://www.bostonherald.com/business/business_markets/2017/11/ge_sued_for_fukushima_disaster
Europe: carelessness, cowardice or concealment of radiation accidents? CRIIRAD report #IAEA #UNSCEAR
Most media were satisfied with reassuring information on the situation in Europe, which unfortunately in their silence.
All lessons must be learned from these dysfunctions both at European and international level so that opacity and indifference do not preside over the management of the next nuclear disaster.
“At the European level, to our knowledge, no instructions have been given to mobilize the networks of measurements and analytical laboratories; no official information has been released; no warning has addressed to European nationals traveling or residing in regions potentially at risk.” CRIIRAD
“All lessons must be learned from these dysfunctions both at European and international level so that opacity and indifference do not preside over the management of the next nuclear disaster.”
The rapid notification system for nuclear accidents set up after the Chernobyl disaster is in total failure. We still do not know which facility is causing the contamination. We do not know how many workers, how many inhabitants, how many children were exposed to radiation; how many were contaminated; what doses of radiation they were able to receive … But all is well, since in Europe ruthenium levels 106 remained very low!
The World Health Organization (WHO)…
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U.N. body calls on Japan to improve protection of press freedoms and Fukushima residents rights
The recommendation also said Japan should abolish or suspend the death penalty, reflecting calls from European Union countries, and continue to provide support to those affected by the Fukushima nuclear crisis caused by the massive 2011 earthquake and tsunami. In particular, a directive to address health issues faced by pregnant mothers and children was noted.
GENEVA
A U.N. body has called on Japan to take steps to better protect press freedoms as concerns about the country’s laws aimed at curtailing leaks of state secrets could hinder the work of journalists.
In another of the 218 non-legally binding recommendations on Japan’s human rights record released by the U.N. Human Rights Council’s working group, Tokyo was urged to apologize and pay compensation to “comfort women” forced to work in Japan’s World War II military brothels.
The recommendations reflected the views of some 105 countries. Of the issues raised, the U.N. council will adopt those that have been accepted by the country in question at a plenary session around March 2018.
In relation to freedom of the press in Japan, the recommendation called on the country to amend Article 4 of the broadcasting law that gives the government authority to suspend broadcasting licenses of TV stations not considered…
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New theory rewrites opening moments of Chernobyl disaster
by Staff Writers
Washington DC (SPX) Nov 20, 2017
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/New_theory_rewrites_opening_moments_of_Chernobyl_disaster_999.html
A brand-new theory of the opening moments during the Chernobyl disaster, the most severe nuclear accident in history, based on additional analysis is presented for the first time in the journal Nuclear Technology, an official journal of the American Nuclear Society.
The new theory suggests the first of the two explosions reported by eyewitnesses was a nuclear and not a steam explosion, as is currently widely thought and is presented by researchers from the Swedish Defence Research Agency, Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, and Stockholm University.
They hypothesize that the first explosive event was a jet of debris ejected to very high altitudes by a series of nuclear explosions within the reactor. This was followed, within three seconds, by a steam explosion which ruptured the reactor and sent further debris into the atmosphere at lower altitudes.
The theory is based on new analysis of xenon isotopes detected by scientists from the V.G. Khlopin Radium Institute in the Leningrad, four days after the accident, at Cherepovets, a city north of Moscow far from the major track of Chernobyl debris.
These isotopes were the product of recent nuclear fission, suggesting they could be the result of a recent nuclear explosion. In contrast, the main Chernobyl debris which tracked northwest to Scandinavia contained equilibrium xenon isotopes from the reactor’s core.
By assessing the weather conditions across the region at the time, the authors also established that the fresh xenon isotopes at Cherepovets were the result of debris injected into far higher altitudes than the debris from the reactor rupture which drifted towards Scandinavia.
Observations of the destroyed reactor tank indicated that the first explosion caused temperatures high enough to melt a two-meter thick bottom plate in part of the core. Such damage is consistent with a nuclear explosion.
In the rest of the core, the bottom plate was relatively intact, though it had dropped by nearly four meters. This suggests a steam explosion which did not create temperatures high enough to melt the plate but generated sufficient pressure to push it down.
Lead author and retired nuclear physicist from the Swedish Defence Research Agency, Lars-Erik De Geer commented, “We believe that thermal neutron mediated nuclear explosions at the bottom of a number of fuel channels in the reactor caused a jet of debris to shoot upwards through the refuelling tubes.
“This jet then rammed the tubes’ 350kg plugs, continued through the roof and travelled into the atmosphere to altitudes of 2.5-3km where the weather conditions provided a route to Cherepovets. The steam explosion which ruptured the reactor vessel occurred some 2.7 seconds later.”
Seismic measurements and an eye-witness report of a blue flash above the reactor a few seconds after the first explosion also support the new hypothesis of a nuclear explosion followed by a steam explosion. This new analysis brings insight into the disaster, and may potentially prove useful in preventing future similar incidents from occurring.
Research Report: A Nuclear Jet at Chernobyl Around 21:23:45 UTC on April 25, 1986
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