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KING-TV reports that "a tunnel full of highly contaminated materials collapsed" in a reprocessing facility at the Hanford nuclear site. An official said "The facility does have radiological contamination right now but there is no indication of a radiological release." The U.S. Department of Energy released statements (archived copy) saying that employees were "told to shelter in place" and that non-essential employees were sent home.
additional coverage:
- Susannah Frame of KING-TV via Twitter (photo)
- Tri-City Herald (video)
- Western Journalism
- Yakima Herald-Republic
- Washington Post
- Seattle Times
- Popular Mechanics
- USA Today
- Fox News
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Tunnel Collapses at Hanford Nuclear Reservation
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
94% of the women in America are beautiful and the rest hang out around here.
(Score: -1, Troll) by idiot_king on Thursday May 11 2017, @02:28AM (17 children)
...idiots come crying out of the woodwork in defense of nuclear "BEING A SAFE ALTERNATIVE TO COAL!!1"
And no, thorium is not safer, either. Radioactive waste is radioactive waste, regardless of what it's created by and who it influences. Wind and solar or bust!
(Or at least in this case, literal COLLAPSE)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 11 2017, @02:53AM
Geothermal. Suck the heat out of Mother Earth's asshole.
(Score: 4, Informative) by tftp on Thursday May 11 2017, @03:04AM (5 children)
idiots come crying out of the woodwork in defense of nuclear "BEING A SAFE ALTERNATIVE TO COAL!!1"
Hanford site was built and operated by and for the military. Plenty of shortcuts were taken. The waste in question was produced when they were making the bombs. Civilian nuclear reactors run on Uranium, as I understand, not on Plutonium. Heaping sins of Cold War and of reckless military management onto the modern industry makes no sense.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by idiot_king on Thursday May 11 2017, @03:14AM (1 child)
....right on cue.
Thanks for proving my point.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday May 11 2017, @03:42AM
(Score: 4, Informative) by butthurt on Thursday May 11 2017, @05:07AM
> Civilian nuclear reactors run on Uranium, as I understand, not on Plutonium.
Military reactors convert uranium-238 into plutonium-239. The fuel rods are removed quickly ("low burn-up") before the plutonium-239 has a chance to absorb additional neutrons and become plutonium-240, plutonium-241 etc. which are undesirable for bomb-making. In civilian reactors, the fuel rods are left in place longer ("high burn-up") so that more of the fuel may be used up. For military use, the fuel rods are chemically processed, separating the uranium from the plutonium, and removing other fission products. That reprocessing is what used to be done at the PUREX plant that this story is about.
(Score: 3, Informative) by rleigh on Thursday May 11 2017, @07:24PM
> Civilian nuclear reactors run on Uranium, as I understand, not on Plutonium
Some use mixed-oxide fuel (MOX), which is both plutonium and uranium blended together. It's been used to reduce the size of plutonium stockpiles for weapons. Russia sold a lot of its plutonium to the US for power generation use, and here in the UK MOX fuel rods are also manufactured for power generation, presumably using our Pu stocks and reprocessed fuel. Sounds like a sensible way to reduce the vast quantities of Pu created in the Cold War.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Friday May 12 2017, @08:43AM
Well.. yes, no, and no.
* Yes - standard fuel bundles ship with uranium only, so a fresh core is uranium normally
* No - Advanced fuels are U/Pu mixes (for instance MOX-fuel is 4% to 11% (avg ~9%) Pu, depending in the isotopic purity of the Pu [military Pu is the lower, the higher is high-burnup civilian Pu])
* No - breed ratio matters, over the course of the 3-4 years fuel spends in an civilian LWR-reactor about 30% of the energy released are from in-situ bred Pu (60% in a CANDU)
(Score: 4, Informative) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Thursday May 11 2017, @03:21AM (1 child)
Thorium per se may not be safer, but burning up 95% of the nuclear energy instead of 1% means that you don't need to store the waste for nearly as long.
The major threat of waste reprocessing is actually nuclear weapons proliferation risk, not the toxicity.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Thursday May 11 2017, @05:38PM
Compounded by the irony of the fact that coal already releases more radioactive material than existing nuclear technology. [scientificamerican.com]
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday May 11 2017, @03:26AM (3 children)
Er...by your own freely-chosen username you're the king of the idiots, aren't you? You seriously might want to consider another handle.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday May 11 2017, @04:18AM (2 children)
Easy on him, Azuma, he has like a four digit UID!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 11 2017, @01:19PM
*facepalm*
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 11 2017, @04:10PM
So, are you suggesting that the idiot king might be going senile by now? That would explain a lot.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday May 11 2017, @03:39AM
...idiots come crying out of the woodwork in defense of nuclear "BEING A SAFE ALTERNATIVE TO COAL!!1"
Sounds like you're well positioned to give us this no-doubt intriguing viewpoint.
And no, thorium is not safer, either. Radioactive waste is radioactive waste, regardless of what it's created by and who it influences.
Except when it's not waste. The whole point behind recycling, nuclear or otherwise, is to turn waste into something useful, and hence, not waste. And you may find the rest of us hard to convince that what happens in a nuclear weapons research facility more than half a century old, due to many decades of neglect, is somehow relevant to nuclear power today.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 11 2017, @03:54AM
It's really not hard to be safer than a global extinction event. Even if all the burred nuclear waste we have around is released in the environment where it stands right now, the death toll will still pale in comparison to the damage global warming can cause.
BEING A SAFE ALTERNATIVE TO COAL
There is no such thing as safety, life is a series of risks of varying degree. If you don't care to manage your own risks, mother nature will do it for you.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Thursday May 11 2017, @08:31AM (1 child)
Coal plants spew out mercury, uranium, thorium, arsenic, and other heavy metals. So it will make air and water toxic but probably mostly an issue for the local surroundings. While global CO2 warming ain't. Nuclear on the other hand avoid most of these matters IF handled correctly. That means Hyman G. Rickover style management and banning of non-engineers on positions of decision.
The Hanford site was hasted into production in 1944 and safety was not a top priority nor were the awareness the same as it is now. So there's plenty to cleanup at the site and present day commercial sites can't really compare.
Wind and solar is great but there is a problem of storing the energy produced until it's needed. Ie no regulation on power output vs demand. This also causes electric grid instabilities. So it's a great resource but it's not a full alternative yet. A electric power mix of 10-20% seems workable currently. There's wave power to be explored to which seem to have a more continuous power output.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday May 11 2017, @10:16AM
Wet dreams, eh?
Wake up before you drown, though; engineers don't have enough gold to make the rules.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford