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U.S. Plutonium Waste Underestimated, Says Researcher
The United States has about three times more waste plutonium than the last official government estimate released 14 years ago, said Robert Alvarez, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies.
The last official estimate of plutonium waste nationwide was 3.7 tons. But Alvarez said a better preliminary estimate is about nearly 14 tons, with about 4.4 tons at Hanford, which produced plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons program. (photo by Flickr user Philo Nordlund) Hanford has been responsible for about a third of the waste, and much of it remains there, according to Alvarez's calculations.
The last official estimate of plutonium waste nationwide was 3.7 tons. But Alvarez said a better preliminary estimate is about nearly 14 tons, with about 4.4 tons at Hanford, which produced plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons program.
"I was very surprised at the inventory of plutonium waste at Hanford," he said.
He plans to publish his findings, which are based on a review of government reports and data, in Science and Global Security, a peer-reviewed journal published by Princeton University. Alvarez was a senior policy adviser at the Department of Energy during the Clinton administration.
Plutonium waste at Hanford includes plutonium mixed in the 53 million gallons of waste held in underground tanks. The worst of that waste will be treated at the $12.3 billion vitrification plant now under construction.
It also includes suspected plutonium-contaminated waste that temporarily was buried in central Hanford starting in 1970 until DOE had a national repository for the waste. Congress ordered that such waste, called transuranic waste, be disposed of a national repository starting that year.
Enough waste to fill 72,000 55-gallon drums temporarily was buried and about two-thirds of it has been dug up. Waste that proves contaminated with plutonium at high enough levels to be classified as transuranic is being shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, the nation's repository for transuranic waste.
Alvarez estimates the stored or buried transuranic waste that has been or will be sent to New Mexico accounts for about half of Hanford's plutonium waste.
But Hanford also has plutonium-contaminated waste buried before 1970 and plutonium-contaminated liquids that were discharged into the soils in central Hanford.
"A lot of this is going to be hard to retrieve," Alvarez said.
DOE has concentrated its efforts in recent years on cleaning up Hanford contamination along the Columbia River, and work is in early stages now to come up with a cleanup plan for central Hanford, where much of the plutonium waste is.
That includes characterization of waste in old burial trenches and in the soil by methods such as drilling, sampling and ground-penetrating radar. The data will be used to develop a proposal that will be reviewed by Hanford regulators, the tribes and the public before a decision is made on how to clean up the waste, according to DOE.
Any decision will be based on actual data, not estimates, said DOE spokesman Geoff Tyree.
"DOE headquarters is checking the report to see if it offers new information," DOE said in a written statement. "This doesn't appear to alter our approach to cleanup."
The DOE Office of Environmental Management has asked an independent technical review board made up of scientists from the national laboratories and DOE offices of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration to do a more comprehensive examination of Alvarez's estimates. That's normal protocol for outside reports, Tyree said.
DOE already is concerned about discharges of radioactive waste to the soil in central Hanford. It's not practical to excavate more than 60 feet below the ground's surface but in central Hanford some contamination is as much as 300 feet deep.
DOE has proposed launching a field research center at Hanford in early 2011 to tackle the problem.
Liquid discharges from the Plutonium Finishing Plant until 1973, when discharges began to be routed to Hanford's underground waste tanks, are of particular concern to Alvarez. He believes plutonium has penetrated deep underground at high rates.
Because of solvents and salts in the liquid, plutonium may have traveled deeper than anticipated, instead of adhering to the soil closer to the ground level, he said.
Alvarez believes levels of plutonium will become the reference contaminant for central Hanford, determining cleanup standards there.
Officials with the state of Washington, a regulator on Hanford work, were on furlough Monday and not available to comment.
Estimates of plutonium waste increased since 1996 for three reasons, Alvarez said in his study. In some cases residual plutonium left at sites such as Hanford was reclassified as waste because the nation no longer needed to gather and process the residual plutonium for the weapons program.
With Hanford tank waste, better characterization by DOE showed the tanks contained about twice the plutonium estimated in 1996.
In addition, DOE did not have measurement technologies when plutonium production began that are as accurate as those used today.
Many of Alvarez's estimates were based on data DOE collected as part of a comprehensive draft study on tank waste, the Draft Tank Closure and Waste Management Environmental Impact Statement released in late October, Tyree said.
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19 Comments so far
Show AllI can remember back twenty years ago wondering why the US chose to put its nuclear reservation anywhere near the Columbia River - Hanford. The Columbia River is the largest fresh water river on the west coast. Never made sense to me. Reminds me of an old saying, "Don't sh*t in your mess kit."
These same brilliant minds want to build more Nuclear plants and create more waste that will outlive our great grand children. That makes no sense to me either.
SOLAR POWER TO THE PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
During the 90s I worked for an engineering firm that had contracts at Hanford. They told me that if I took a job there I would have 5,000 years of job security.
Hanford is in the floodplain of the Columbia River. It's a disaster waiting to happen. Now let's all say it for the politicians, just after the eventual disaster, "I'm shocked, shocked!"
...reveals typical lies & deception of the American people, who are treated like robots and zombies.
Ok so this is really just another story about some research guy that ....bla bla bla hasn't been substantiated yet by the DOE agent, Tyree. Do we all already know that the waste is a problem, in vast amounts, spuriously handled, and probably more lethal or more quantity than somehow originally documented...of course. Thanks Annette for the toxic reminder, and that there is some guy doing a dissertation about it.
whocares;)
I do.
14 tons is not 4 tons, and reporting 3.7 tons nationally with 4.4 tons at Hanford is a major difference.
I am fascinated by discussions of radiation and toxicity in which people say, "Well, the damage has been done." But in both cases the damage increases exponentially while the toxin increases linearly until the general result is quick fatality.
Government and industry cannot completely avoid the escape of some information about the damages they cause by these practices. So they trick up the language and shave down the numbers so that people do not make connections,
until you step outside your job at, say, the UCLA mail room and see the big sign on the door not ten feet away: DANGER: RADIATION.
At least UCLA labelled it. The trucks that carry it on the highway are only marked HAZARDOUS WASTE.
Your 100% correct :)
New Mexico calls itself "The Land of Enchantment". It could also be referred to as "First In Fission". We have a long and enriched history with plutonium. Currently the element can be found at Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL), Sandia National Laboratories, Kirtland Air Force Base and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). NM is a poor state and jobs are hard to find. Our Representatives and Senators are always looking for radioactive pork to bring home to the voters. A massive facility for manufacturing and reprocessing plutonium pits is now under construction at LANL. Every year there is a caravan of morbidly curious people who make the pilgrimage to Trinity Site where the first plutonium bomb was tested in July 1945. For many years a museum at Los Alamos had a orange atomic bomb casing similar to the one dropped at Hiroshima in its front lobby as well as the flight log of the Enola Gay which carried the bomb from Tinian Island. That casing has been removed but deep within the museum are models of hydrogen bombs which may be touched and frotaged depending upon the visitors pleasure. Plutonium is highly toxic and man made. None was present on the earth until the 1940's. Today we have no idea of the number of tons of this element that have been created; however, we do know its only purpose for existing is to cause death on a massive scale
"deep within the museum are models of hydrogen bombs which may be touched and frotaged depending upon the visitors pleasure."
Frottage: consensual sexual rubbing between partners. I once laughed at "missile envy". And this choice is "depending upon the visitors pleasure." Are you sure this museum isn't in Nevada where human-Hbomb sexual trysts are legal? You know, that scene in "Doctor Strangelove" was pretty racy for its day.
If the USan status quo entertains trillion doller bailouts for mega-criminals who should be jailed and their rackets disassembled, what makes you think the USan status quo does not also entertain defeat/death/destruction in every sector including the nuke rackets?
Maybe we should dust off the "Fast Reactor" technology that Clinton, Kerry and others shut down in the 1990's. There is maybe enough depleted uranium and transuranic waste lying around the US and old USSR to electrify the planet for hundreds of years without mining any new uranium.
A thousand years of free DU fuel just sitting there waiting to be made into armor piercing shells, and mix in/burn up all that plutonium and spent reactor fuel before some terrorist gets his hands on it. No CO2. Reactors with hundred year plus life times with ultimate waste that is safe in decades, not millennia.
Just a thought.
Both the industry and the government, including the regulatory NRC, regularly falsifies these reports.
Someone may know just how much waste there is, but that someone is not likely talking.
Pssst! Wanna buy ten tons of plutonium? Trust me, nobody's gonna miss it!
Well it did say he was surprised!
>^^<
I wonder why the author said nothing about the millions of gallons of radioactive waste that rests in single wall steel tanks underground at Hanford, most of which have been leaking into the groundwater for over twenty years. I wonder whay he said nothing about the increasing radioactivity of plants and soil along the Columbia shore around the Hanford reservation. If this dude is saying, 14, not four, you can probably guess at how much there really is. Not pretty at all. I assume this may be why the practice of yoga is so wide spread in the Columbia basin down stream from Hanford.
OK here are a few factoids:
Most of the waste in the Hanford tanks contains very little plutonium. It's what was left over after the plutonium was removed from the process. It's mainly aluminates and nitrate salts and is kept at a rather high pH to keep the tanks from corroding. The main radionuclides are Cesium 137 and Strontium 90, both of which have half lives of around 30 years. Thus in the Hanford tanks most of the radioactive dose in the tanks will be gone in around 300 years if nothing is done with them. People in Europe live in houses older than that.
Hanford was chosen because it was remote and had a good water supply for cooling the reactors. Look at a map of Washington state printed between 1940's and 1960 and there will be a big blank spot where Hanford is.
Making enriched U for energy generation produces way less waste than making bomb grade Pu. Don't base your fear of nuclear power on the waste issues surrounding bomb production.
One does not need nuclear material to have radiation. Medical X-Rays are one of the largest sources of radiation exposure for the general public. Cosmic ray exposure during plane flight is another source of radiation exposure. Neither of these have anything to do with radioactive material.
Have a pleasant day