Hanford is the gift that keeps on giving. I could blog about nothing but the cleanup work at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and never run out of material. Recently there have been a series of Hanford Cleanup public meeting in Seattle, Portland and Richland. Well prepared officials from Hanford came to the meetings with slide shows and glossy handouts explaining how well everything is going.
More information keeps coming out about the February 14th accident at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant which resulted in the release of particles of plutonium and americium into the environment around Carlsbad, New Mexico. There are reports that the radioactive isotopes have been found much further away from the plant. Twenty one people in the facility were exposed to radiation during the accident.
In 1975 at the Brown's Ferry nuclear power plant in Alabama, they were having problems with electrical wiring below the control room. There were air leaks in the cable spreading room and engineers were working to repair the leaks with spongy foam rubber. One of the men was using a candle to detect the air leaks. When he held the candle too close to a piece of the foam rubber, it burst into flame.
I have blogged before about small modular reactors (SMR). There are different definitions of SMRs but for the purpose of this post, they generate under five hundred megawatts. The intent is to mass produce them in factories and then transport them to sites where they will be used. SMRs are still being designed, with investors and customers being sought. The U.S.
