Hanford nuclear plant Washington-gctid808274

[Guest]

Something happened up there this morning in Washington. not getting much news down here.

[aspen1880]

limited info, but they filed to change their name

to fukishima washington

[yachtman]

https://patch.com/us/across-america/hanford-plutonium-plant-tunnel-reportedly-collapses

My ex lives there

[Iproff]

Just a cave in over top of the railroad cars that hold nuclear waste.

Ken

[Mlydy]

My wife has family that lives in that area. My brother-in-law did electrical work at the Handford Site about two years ago. Freaky place for sure. Actually my wife worked for Pacific Northwest National Lab for a couple of years as well. That was fun to drive around until you hit the areas with military guys with m-16's. that's when you just turn around

[freedre]

"Iproff" post=808332 wrote:
Just a cave in over top of the railroad cars that hold nuclear waste.

Ken

Is that all?

That's not scary at all :S

[CptCrunchie]

Just watched the news about it. Because of its age, seems it could eventually become a nose-bleed for this one and every other nuclear site in the US. Estimated cost is $100,000,000,000 per site and it will take between 40-60 years. Yet, a major earthquake and the entire state and a good piece of Canada would become radioactive making the entire area unlivable.

Yeah, not scary at all. Sheeesh! :blink:

[Solandri]

"CptCrunchie" post=808370 wrote:
Just watched the news about it. Because of its age, seems it could eventually become a nose-bleed for this one and every other nuclear site in the US. Estimated cost is $100,000,000,000 per site and it will take between 40-60 years.

Hanford is where the waste from U.S. production of nuclear weapons is stored. It was not a commercial power production plant - its reactors were plutonium-based rather than uranium. The site dates back to the Manhattan Project, so a lot of it was built based on predicted future problems, rather than experience with actual future problems; or even with no though put into future problems. So it's not unexpected that there are problems cropping up with its construction (what is unexpected is that we're refusing to spend the money to fix the problems).

While numbers like $100 billion sound scary, it's important to realize that nuclear plants produce a humongous amount of energy. The San Onofre power plant near me was recently shut down halfway through its expected 60 year lifespan after a botched maintenance upgrade to its cooling pipes. During the 30 years it was in operation, it produced about half a billion megawatt-hours of electricity, which at California's $0.15/kWh average electricity price works out to about $80 billion worth of electricity.

In the U.S., decommissioning costs for commercial nuclear plants are by law included in the price you pay for the electricity they generate. Worldwide, if you take the cleanup costs for Fukushima and Chernobyl (approx $200-$300 billion each), and divide it by the total amount of power generated by all nuclear plants, the cleanup cost ends up around 0.2 - 0.3 cents per kWh. Much cheaper than other power sources, about 10x cheaper than the subsidy we give to wind, and about 100x cheaper than the subsidy we give to solar.

Part of the reason it's so cheap (and the reason the nuclear industry isn't panicking even though Nevada canceled the long-term waste storage site in the Yucca Mountains) is that they simply don't produce much waste. A typical nuclear plant produces about a couple bathtubs worth of spent fuel in a year of operation. All the nuclear plants in the U.S. produce enough spent fuel in a year to fill about a single tractor trailer. And all the spent fuel they've produced since they began operating in the 1950s would fill a couple olympic-sized swimming pools. (The stored volume is slightly bigger because you need some separation between the spent rods lest they start reacting again.) Without a permanent storage site, the plants are simply storing decades worth of spent fuel in pools of water on their premises. (The volume of low-level waste is much higher - basically stuff that's been irradiated. But that is also much easier to deal with - often simple dilution is enough.)

The NS Savannah (experimental nuclear merchant ship) operated for about 10 years using 163 pounds (about 1 gallon) of uranium. An equivalent fuel-powered ship would've burned approximately 29 million gallons of fuel oil during that time. As another comparison, generating the electricity used by a typical U.S. home for 30 years requires a rail car worth of coal (about 100 tons). A nuclear plant can do it using about 3 tablespoons of uranium. More fun equivalencies: Replacing Fukushima Daiichi's electricity production with wind would require approximately 10,000 1.5 MW turbines with rotors about 75 meters in diameter. Not a trivial undertaking, and based on the fatality rate of wind turbine maintenance workers, would be much more dangerous than nuclear plants. Replacing it with PV solar would require about 40 installations the size of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_... /> Solar Star. So approx 70 million solar panels covering 520 km^2, which coincidentally is about the same area as the "no-go" zone around Fukushima (20 km radius).

[CptCrunchie]

"Solandri" post=808386 wrote:
While numbers like $100 billion sound scary, it's important to realize that nuclear plants produce a humongous amount of energy. The San Onofre power plant near me was recently shut down halfway through its expected 60 year lifespan after a botched maintenance upgrade to its cooling pipes. During the 30 years it was in operation, it produced about half a billion megawatt-hours of electricity, which at California's $0.15/kWh average electricity price works out to about $80 billion worth of electricity.

Thank you for that. Using those numbers, the problem is still how to pay for the cleanup, because if you spend the money you earned, even after 30 years of service, the income is awash and the shareholders take a massive $20 billion loss.

I think nuclear power is amazing and needed, but what to do with the waste? .....Unless you are suggesting we just leave it alone and hope for the best.

[JThiessen]

'Bout 30 years ago I worked at the INEL (Idaho National Engineering Laboratory). They are also the storage site for 3 Mile Island debris.

The poster above obviously has some type of experience with nuclear power, or is really good at google!

At the time I was there, they had a power plant they were experimenting with that used its own waste as power (I have no idea how...). Wasnt quite 100% efficient at the time.

Pretty much zero chance of ever building a new power plant in the US due to the bad publicity.

My ex wife also worked there, and was exposed once in some type of event - her dosimeter did not show anything though. It was years later when she was contacted and questioned about the day. She passed at the age of 43 with extensive cancer - connection? Maybe, maybe not.

That kind of power, while remarkable in what it can do is amazing, but it really needs to be handled and treated with utmost respect. The military and France seem to do well with it.

[Solandri]

"CptCrunchie" post=808410 wrote:
Thank you for that. Using those numbers, the problem is still how to pay for the cleanup, because if you spend the money you earned, even after 30 years of service, the income is awash and the shareholders take a massive $20 billion loss.

That's for plant which was shut down about halfway through its expected lifetime. And has its decomissioning costs already budgeted and paid for via a trust fund. Basically a single reactor operating for a lifetime is more than enough to pay for the worst nuclear cleanup site in the U.S.

I think nuclear power is amazing and needed, but what to do with the waste? .....Unless you are suggesting we just leave it alone and hope for the best.

"JThiessen" post=808477 wrote:
'The military and France seem to do well with it.

The "waste" from light water nuclear reactors (the kind typically used for power generation) still contains about 90%-93% of the energy the original uranium started with. That's why it's radioactive for so long - because all that remaining energy continues to leak out for tens of thousands of years, meaning the material remains dangerously radioactive for that long.

You can extract that remaining energy by using what's called a breeder reactor. To it, the spent fuel from a light water reactor is usable as fuel. It generates energy, and converts the spent fuel into different materials which can be re-used as fuel in light water reactors. That's why I call it "spent fuel" instead of "waste." Because it's not waste; it's a product which is very useful in a different way. Done this way, you can extract about 90%-95% of the energy in the uranium, and the final resulting waste is only dangerously radioactive for about 100-200 years.

France and the U.S. military reprocess their spent fuel (send it through a breeder reactor). That's why they don't have a waste storage problem. The U.S. banned breeder reactors for commercial power generation in the 1970s. You see, in addition to converting the spent fuel into new fuel for light water reactors, a breeder reactor also creates weapons-grade plutonium. So the U.S. decided to ban breeder reactors in the interest of nuclear non-proliferation.

I don't really have an opinion about this policy. Obviously it has big pros and big cons, and honestly I don't really know which is bigger. But it's important to understand that:

[ul]

[li]The "nuclear waste" problem is not a technical problem. It's a political problem. We chose to create the waste problem in order to avoid a nuclear proliferation problem.

Lesser of two evils and all that.[/li]

[li]If you fast-forward a century or two, if we haven't killed the planet by nuking each other, most countries on earth will have access to or possess nuclear weapons. Non-proliferation will be much less of an issue. And all this "waste" which the doomsayers say will be a problem for tens of thousands of years, will suddenly become a valuable energy source without any real downside. So the "waste" is not really going to stick around for tens of thousands of years. We're going to use it all up as fuel long before them.[/li]

[/ul]

[Douggy]

I would never live anywhere near Hanford or any nuclear weapons, storage, power or processing facility.

[yachtman]

"Douggy" post=808528 wrote:
I would never live anywhere near Hanford or any nuclear weapons, storage, power or processing facility.

Living near one ? Define living near one. I live about 2 1/2 hours from Hanford by car i would consider that I don't live near one. However it's about 150 miles by car much less by air as the crow flies. Which is a distance.but when you realize that I live.almost directly down wind of Hanford that is a completely different story as its about the distance that the particles will be falling down.

When st Helens blew up which is 300 miles away it became almost completey dark from ash but we are again down wind.

So you don't really need to live " near" one to be affected by an event you just need.to live in it's wind path and that could be many many miles way

[attachment]36184 wrote:
met_doe_fukushima_cesium_map_becquerels_april29_20 11_mvb-annot1.jpg[/attachment]

[attachment]36184 wrote:
met_doe_fukushima_cesium_map_becquerels_april29_20 11_mvb-annot1.jpg[/attachment] [attachment]36185 wrote:
Chernobyl4a.GIF[/attachment]

Those are fallout maps of nuclear event's note you dont really need to live by one to be involved

[Douggy]

"yachtman" post=808532 wrote:

"Douggy" post=808528 wrote:
I would never live anywhere near Hanford or any nuclear weapons, storage, power or processing facility.

Living near one ? Define living near one. I live about 2 1/2 hours from Hanford by car i would consider that I don't live near one. However it's about 150 miles by car much less by air as the crow flies. Which is a distance.but when you realize that I live.almost directly down wind of Hanford that is a completely different story as its about the distance that the particles will be falling down.

When st Helens blew up which is 300 miles away it became almost completey dark from ash but we are again down wind.

So you don't really need to live " near" one to be affected by an event you just need.to live in it's wind path and that could be many many miles way

[attachment]36184 wrote:
met_doe_fukushima_cesium_map_becquerels_april29_20 11_mvb-annot1.jpg[/attachment]

[attachment]36184 wrote:
met_doe_fukushima_cesium_map_becquerels_april29_20 11_mvb-annot1.jpg[/attachment] [attachment]36185 wrote:
Chernobyl4a.GIF[/attachment]

Those are fallout maps of nuclear event's note you dont really need to live by one to be involved

An event on the scale of Chernobyl or Fukshima is not what I was thinking. Events on the scale of Hanford with cancer clusters being reported is what I'm talking about.

[Solandri]

"Douggy" post=808528 wrote:
I would never live anywhere near Hanford or any nuclear weapons, storage, power or processing facility.

I'm not going to tell people what to do. But unfortunately, this type of thinking is common. It's the same reason people are afraid of flying on airplanes even though they're safer than all other forms of transport. Or (going the other way) why people buy lottery tickets when the odds of winning are infinitesimal. When we make decisions, we tend to dwell on the consequences, while ignoring the chances of the consequences actually happening.

Here are your odds of dying from various causes (over a lifetime):

http://www.nsc.org/learn/safety-knowledge/Pages/injury-facts-chart.aspx

Heart Disease and Cancer 1 in 7

Chronic Lower Respiratory Disease 1 in 28

Intentional Self-harm 1 in 95

Unintentional Poisoning by and Exposure to Noxious Substances 1 in 96

Motor Vehicle Crash 1 in 114

Fall 1 in 127

Assault by Firearm 1 in 370

Car Occupant 1 in 645

Pedestrian Incident 1 in 647

Motorcycle Rider Incident 1 in 985

Unintentional Drowning and Submersion 1 in 1,188

Exposure to Fire, Flames or Smoke 1 in 1,498

Choking from Inhalation and Ingestion of Food 1 in 3,461

Pedacyclist Incident 1 in 4,486

Firearms Discharge 1 in 6,905

Air and Space Transport Incidents 1 in 9,821

Exposure to Electric Current, Radiation, Temperature and Pressure 1 in 15,212

Exposure to Excessive Natural Heat 1 in 16,584

Contact with Sharp Objects 1 in 38,174

Contact with Heat and Hot Substances 1 in 56,992

Contact with Hornets, Wasps and Bees 1 in 63,225

Cataclysmic Storm 1 in 66,335

Being Bitten or Struck by a Dog 1 in 112,400

Legal Execution 1 in 119,012

Lightning Strike 1 in 161,856

Your odds of dying from a nuclear accident (all types, not just commercial power generation) are about the same as for a lightning strike. Those nuclear fatalities have mostly been from military and medical irradiation accidents. In the U.S., there has never been a fatality at or due to commercial nuclear power generation. Statistically, per amount of energy generated, nuclear power is the safest form of power generation man has invented. Yes, even safer than wind, solar, and hydro. Wind kills maintenance workers in falls. Solar kills rooftop installers in falls. Hydro kills people in dam failures.

The most dangerous thing most people do every day is get into a car. That's over a thousand times more likely to kill you than a nuclear accident. Yet people who are horrified at the prospect of nuclear power blithely text while driving, cut people off, try to beat the red light, etc.