Last February there was an “incident” at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, New Mexico. Radioactive particles escaped from the geological repository for wastes associated with nuclear weapons production. A drum of waste exploded and released the radioactive particles which were detected up to twenty miles away. Filters and fans did not work correctly which allowed the radioactive material to escape.

          The WIPP has existed for about fifteen years and it appears that corners were cut and procedures ignored. Originally the separate “rooms” in the old salt mine were to be sealed with two foot thick doors when they were full of drums of waste. Then they changed to steel doors. Eventually they dispensed with doors altogether. There would have been no radioactive release last February if the “room” where the drum exploded was sealed properly.

        Apparently a mix of chemicals generated explosive gas. The exact contents of the drum are not know because records were not kept correctly. The drum is one of a batch of a hundred of drum from the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) that were treated with the wrong chemicals before being shipped to WIPP. Other drums may explode. Investigation is ongoing on the incident and the danger posed by other drums in the same group from LANL. The repository is shut down while the level of radiation goes down and examinations are conducted.

        The huge “rooms” at WIPP left from mining the salt are being filled with drums of waste. Eventually it is expected that the ceilings of the “rooms” will collapse onto the drums of waste in the sealed “rooms” entombing them. Unfortunately, the pressure from the surrounding geological formations is causing the walls of the mine to shift. This month, it was reported that one wall of one of the rooms was collapsing inward so they had to use bolts to reattach the wall. Other areas have required bolts to reinforce and apparently the number of bolts per linear foot is exceeding safety standards.

        A few weeks ago, it was revealed that portions of the ceiling in one of the “rooms” had collapsed. An inspection team found that there were seven areas in the “rooms” that were in danger because bolts were failing. To date, over three hundred damaged bolts have had to be removed. The bolting of ceilings is critical to safety and is proceeding as part of the general recovery from the accident last year.

       The situation at WIPP just keeps getting worse. WIPP is the only national geological repository for nuclear weapons waste. Negligence has resulted in the release of radioactive materials. If other drums explode, there may be more releases. It may be that they have not yet fully detailed all the problems in at WIPP. It will take years and hundreds of millions of dollars to repair the damages in and disintegration of the repository. This could have been prevented if the NRC had done its job and the WIPP operators had been held to the written regulations for the repository.

WIPP ceiling bolts: 

Government approves plan to ‘drain’ Fukushima nuclear waste into ocean. enenews.com

Prosecutors in Japan have passed for a second time on the option of indicting former executives of the Tokyo Electric Power Company for falling short on safety obligations made evident when an earthquake and tsunami devastated the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant almost four years ago. nuclearstreet.com

Iran warned the US Congress on Friday against imposing new sanctions, saying this would lead to a collapse of negotiations over Iran’s controversial nuclear program. straitstimes.com

A list of planned nuclear outages in German nuclear power plants has been published. brecorder.com

 

         The International Energy Agency (IEA) said last year that about half of the four hundred and thirty four existing power reactors around the world will be shut down by the year 2040. The cost of decommissioning these two hundred reactors was estimated to be about one hundred billion dollars. The head of the IEA said that this cost was a rough estimate and that the cost could well be twice as much. He admitted that the cost of decommissioning of reactors could vary by a factor of four. Other experts say that these estimate are far too low because they do not include permanent disposal of the spent nuclear fuel assemblies from the reactors.

         Decommissioning costs decades in the future will vary greatly by specific reactor and specific country. The exact cost of decommissioning will depend on the reactor type, size and location. The availability of proper disposal facilities and the condition of the reactor at the time of decommissioning will be important. And after all the costs of decommissioning have been assessed, there will still be additional costs depending on the future intended use of the site of the reactor. Technology for decommissioning may become cheaper in the  future. However, disposal of spent nuclear fuel will most likely become more expensive as time goes by.

        In the United States, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has estimated that the cost of decommissioning the one hundred nuclear power reactors in the U.S. at around three hundred million to four hundred million dollars each but some reactors may cost a great deal more. The NRC mandates that reactor owners maintain a fund that will be sufficient to decommission all the reactors that they own. The NRC is currently saying that twenty operating U.S. reactors do not have a fund big enough to decommission them. I think that this U.S. estimate is far too low.

        France has fifty eight operating reactors and the French government says that their cost of decommissioning will be somewhere around thirty five billion dollars. This amounts to about six hundred billion dollars per reactor. It seems that the French estimate is much too low.

         Germany is shutting down and decommissioning all of their seventeen nuclear reactors because of the Fukushima disaster. Germany estimates the cost of decommissioning them at over two billion dollars each. This appears to be far more realistic that other estimates in this post.

        Japan is engaged in restarting its forty eight nuclear power reactors after all were shut down following the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. They estimate that the cost of decommissioning will be thirty billion dollars which would amount to about six hundred million dollars per reactor, around the same estimate as France. Both these estimates are much too low.

        Russia has thirty three nuclear power reactors and estimates that it will cost between five hundred million and a billion dollars per reactor. This estimate is probably too low.

        My great fear is that there will not be enough money available when the time come to decommission some of the world’s nuclear power reactors. Initially, the companies that own power reactors may not have the money and will throw the burden back on the taxpayers in particular countries. Given the current unstable condition of the global economic system, the governments may not have the money. The reactors may simply be shut off and boarded up eventually leaking radioactive material out into the environment and threatening public health.

On 1/20/2015, TEPCO announced they detected 223,000 Bq/Kg of Cesium-134/137 from Jacopever fished inner Fukushima plant port. fukushima-diary.com

Fukushima plume spread worldwide, far exceeding the hundreds of miles mentioned previously. enenews.com

Russia is ready to continue cooperation with the United States in global nuclear security issues, Russia’s state-owned atomic energy corporation Rosatom said Thursday. news.xinhuanet.com

Japan’s signature on the Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage makes the international agreement binding after a 17-year pregnant pause in which Japan, despite its problems at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, was hesitant to sign. nuclearstreet.com

          After decades of poorly regulated nuclear weapons development and manufacturing and decades more of cleanup efforts, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in central Washington State is still one of the most radioactively polluted areas on the entire planet.  Shortage of money, poor oversight and incompetence are still hampering cleanup efforts. In Russia, there is a similar legacy from the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons development around Murmansk which polluted the region’s land, rivers and water table with nuclear waste. The U.S. and the Soviet Union are the two biggest builders of nuclear weapons on Earth. However, they are not the only countries with nuclear pollution left over from nuclear weapons work.

        In the U.K., the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing site was built on the Cumbria coast of northwest England in the late 1940s to produce plutonium for creating the U.K. atomic bomb. The Sellafield site is also the location of the first commercial nuclear power plant in the world. Sellafield became the storage site for spent nuclear fuel from nuclear power reactors in the U.K.

       Sellafield holds four of the most dangerous stores of radioactive wastes in the world. They in the 1950s. There are four ponds and silos of nuclear waste dating back to the beginning of the nuclear age that have been designated as high priority for cleanup. These silos and ponds contain hundreds of tons of highly radioactive materials left over from more than sixty years of operation. The exact contents of the ponds and silos is unknown. The silos are cracking and leaking. The ponds are leaking into the soil. There is a risk of explosions from gases that are generated by corrosion. An accident at Sellafield could have devastating consequences for the U.K.

         A private consortium was created in 2008 called the Nuclear Management Partners. They were supposed to bring “world-class expertise” to the job. Now, six years later, two of the four high priority projects are behind schedule. The three hundred foot Pile pond holds spent nuclear and other waste left over from work on nuclear weapons in the 1950s and 1960s. It was supposed to be completely drained by 2025 but a new schedule published last December now says that the pond will be cleaned up by 2030. The accompanying Pile fuel cladding silo which was filled up in 1964 was supposed to be done by 2025. The new schedule called for 2029.  

         Last week, the U.K. government announced that it was abandoning the privatization experiment after six years of disappointing progress. The one hundred and twenty billion dollar contract with Nuclear Management Partners has been cancelled. The cleanup project will be handled by the U.K. Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. The cleanup is now scheduled to be finished by 2120 at a cost of almost three billion dollars a year.

         While I applaud the U.K. government in cancelling the consortium’s contract, I am somewhat astonished that the U.K. government thinks that they can plan for a hundred year cleanup program. There are so many looming global economic, political, social and environmental problems that the U.K. would be lucky to be able to make solid plans for the next twenty years. A one hundred years program is just a fantasy.

Sellafield Pile Cladding Silo: 

 

Two workers died in separate incidents involving water storage tanks at two different nuclear power plants, located in the Japanese prefecture of Fukushima. sputniknews.com

Top U.S. Treasury and State Department officials said on Wednesday that, despite reports, Russia had not entered into oil-for-goods deals with Iran in violation of international sanctions. reuters.com

North Korea has threatened to demonstrate its nuclear deterrence in a move analysts say could indicate the regime is preparing to carry out a fourth atomic test amid long-stalled disarmament talks. dailytimes.com.pk

French regulator warns that EDF nuclear reactor license extensions are not “A given.” nuclearstreet.com

 

 

         The U.S. Air Force has a variety of radiation detectors that are used to detect radioactive materials that might be smuggled into the U.S. by terrorists. One detector is small enough to fit in a back pack. Other detectors are designed to be used on aircraft or container ships. When there is a possibility of radioactive materials, these detectors are used to take a “radiological fingerprint” which can identify different types of radioactive materials.

          These detectors are looking for gamma rays and neutron emissions from radioactive materials. They utilize helium-3 which interacts with neutrons to produce charged particles that are easily detected. Unfortunately, the supply of helium-3 is very small and it is diminishing rapidly. Most of the U.S. supply of helium-3 has been produced through the decay of tritium.

         Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen. Most hydrogen atoms consists of a proton and an electron. Deuterium is a form of hydrogen that contains a neutron as well as a proton and an electron. Tritium contains two neutrons as well as a proton and an electron. It’s nucleus is unstable and will eventually emit an electron (called beta decay) and become helium-3. The half life of tritium is about twelve years. It is only present in nature in tiny trace amounts that are produced when cosmic rays interact with hydrogen in the atmosphere. It is also recovered when nuclear weapons are decommissioned. Most of the U.S. tritium has been produced in this way. As the number of warheads being decommissioned has decreased, the production of tritium has decreased and so has the recovery of helium-3.  

        The supply of helium-3 is not only important for national security but it is also very important in medical uses such as cryogenics and medical imaging technology. The U.S. stopped producing helium-3 in 1988. Since the 911 attack on the U.S. demand for helium-3 for radiation detectors has been rising as the supply has been shrinking. Methods other than tritium decay can be used to produce helium-3 but they are expensive and complex. A small supply of helium-3 is available from special Canadian reactors but not enough to meet demand. Research on nuclear fusion utilizing helium-3 has been hampered by the low supply of helium-3 and skyrocketing prices.

       One possible future source of helium-3 is the dust on the surface of the moon. Millions of years of bombardment of the lunar surface by the solar wind has produced tritium. It is estimated that one tenth of a metric ton of helium-3 exists on the Earth but there may be millions of metric tons of helium-3 on the Moon. The U.S. government is searching for ways of producing helium-3 and limiting the use of helium-3 but no effective solution to the shortage has been identified.

Artist’s concept of a lunar helium-3 mining operation: