Ambient office = 90 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 90 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 89 nanosieverts per hour

Blueberry from Central Market = 73 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 100 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 93 nanosieverts per hour

     The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is a federal facility in an old salt mine near Carlsbad, New Mexico. The plant was completed about twenty years ago and put into operation to receive shipments of radioactive waste from national laboratories and nuclear weapon production facilities around the U.S. The waste includes special boxes and barrels packed with lab coats, rubber gloves, tools and debris contaminated with plutonium and other radioactive elements. No liquid is allowed in the drums that are shipped to WIPP.
      The WIP has been operating for over two decades and has received almost thirteen thousand shipments. It is believed that the shifting salt in the old salt mine will eventually encapsulate the waste after the underground chambers are filled and sealed.
      In 2014, a barrel from the Los Alamos National Laboratory was treated with a new absorbent that had not been sufficiently tested. The chemical processes in the barrel generated hydrogen gas which accumulated and eventually exploded. Problems with the air conditioning and filters allowed radioactive materials to escape from repository into the surrounding countryside.
      The incident slowed down the federal government’s cleanup program. It also prompted policy changes at national laboratories and defense related sites around the U.S. New Mexico state regulators are considering a permit change that some critics say could make expanded operations at the WIPP possible. A final decision is expected later this year.
      The WIPP was closed for three years while expensive cleanup and repairs were carried out. The repository is operating again. Lack of space became a serious concern following the 2014 event because some areas of the mine had to be close off.     
     The U.S. government has been mining a new chamber called Panel 8 at the WIPP. The new chamber took seven years to dig and will be put into use beginning next year. Workers still need to run power lines to the newly excavated. Air monitors and chain link to protect the walls also need to be installed.
     Reinhard Knerr is a manager with the Department of Energy’s Carlsbad Field Office. He said that the completion of Panel 8 had taken a long time, but it will be ready just in time because Panel 7 is expected to be full by next April.
      The rooms that make up Panel 8 are three hundred feet long, thirty-three feet wide and fifteen feet high. Operators say that laser measuring devices were used to guide the mining machines that cut the salt. Big trucks were used to take the removed materials to a hoist that moved them to the surface. More than one hundred fifty-seven thousand tons of salt were mined during the Panel 8 project.
      The next project at the WIPP will be for the mining machines to carve out passageways that will connect Panel 8 to a utility shaft that is currently under construction.
      There have been a number of incidents at national laboratories and at the WIPP which suggest that regulations have not been followed properly in the operation of the repository. Hopefully things will run more smoothly in the future at the WIPP.

Ambient office = 73 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 19 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 127 nanosieverts per hour

Banana from Central Market = 104 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 100 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 82 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient office = 80 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 89 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 91 nanosieverts per hour

Carrot from Central Market = 66 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 108 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 102 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient office = 85 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 115 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 111 nanosieverts per hour

Avocado from Central Market = 125 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 93 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 72 nanosieverts per hour

Dover sole – Caught in USA = 109 nanosieverts per hour

Part 3 of 3 Parts (Please read Parts 1 and 2 first)
Exotic metals
     Nuclear containment vessels for nuclear fission reactors are made of a variety of exotic rare metals that control and contain the nuclear fission reaction. Hafnium acts as a neutron absorber, beryllium acts as a neutron reflector, zirconium is used as cladding for the fuel rods and niobium alloys with steel to protect it from forty to sixty year of neutron embrittlement. Mining and refining these metals raise concerns about cost, sustainability and environmental impact. In addition, there are many industrial processes that compete for these metals. Hafnium is used in microchips and beryllium is also needed by the semiconductor industry. If a nuclear reactor is being constructed every day somewhere in the world, the global supply of these exotic metals needed to build containment vessels would quickly be depleted and there would be a mineral resource crisis. This is a new argument that Abbott raises. It places resource limits on all future-generation nuclear reactors.
     As Abbott mentions, many of these same problems would plague fusion reactors in addition to fission reactors even though commercial nuclear fusion power is still decades in the future.
      Of course, there are not that many nuclear power advocates who are calling for a nuclear utopia in which nuclear fission power supplies all the world’s energy needed. However, many nuclear advocates do suggest that the world should try to produce one terawatt of world power from nuclear energy. This may be feasible in the short run. On the other hand, if Abbott’s numbers for fifteen terawatts are divided by fifteen, even one terawatt of nuclear power production is barely feasible. Based on these estimations, Abbott questions whether or not nuclear fission power generation can even be scaled up to one terawatt. He suggests that the same investment would be better spent on technologies that are fully scalable.
     Abbott said, “Due to the cost, complexity, resource requirements, and tremendous problems that hang over nuclear power, our investment dollars would be more wisely placed elsewhere. Every dollar that goes into nuclear power is dollar that has been diverted from assisting the rapid uptake of a safe and scalable solution such as solar thermal.”
     Solar thermal devices harness the energy of the Sun to produce heat that creates steam that turns generators to generate electricity. Solar thermal technology avoids many of the scalability problems that trouble the nuclear power industry. A solar thermal farm requires about the same amount of land area needed for an equivalent nuclear power plant infrastructure. However, unlike nuclear power, solar thermal farms can be sited in unused desert areas. It is also constructed from safer and more abundant materials. The most import thing about solar thermal farms is that they can be scaled to produce not just fifteen terawatts but hundreds of terawatts in that is ever needed.
     However, the biggests problem with solar thermal technology is cloudy days and nighttime. Abbott is planning to research a variety of storage solutions for this intermittency problem. This problem also plagues other renewable energy solutions such as wind power. During the transition period of the near future, Abbott suggests that solar thermal farms and natural gas is the path toward building a practical future energy infrastructure.