Treatment Plant for Waste in Nuclear Cleanup Has Design Flaws, Panel Says
Source: New York Times
A treatment plant that the Energy Department is counting on to stabilize the radioactive waste at the nation’s largest environmental cleanup project, at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State, has design problems that could lead to chemical explosions, inadvertent nuclear reactions and mechanical breakdowns, a federal advisory panel warned on Tuesday.
The panel, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, said the waste was also not safe where it was now, in leaking tanks that have long put dangerous pollutants into the soil a few miles from the Columbia River. In addition to the leaks, the board said, radioactive sludge and liquids in the tanks produce hydrogen that could burn and further disperse the waste.
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The board described the difficulties in a letter to Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who is the chairman of the Senate Energy Committee. Mr. Wyden said in an interview on Tuesday that the board’s experts had raised “a serious question as to whether this plant is going to work at all.”
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The project also has issues, apparently still not resolved, about whether managers have sought to intimidate professional staff members who raised safety questions. In 2010, the board received a letter from a former engineering manager, Walter Tamosaitis, in which he alleged that he “was removed from the project because he identified technical issues that could affect safety.” The board investigated and agreed that the site had “a flawed safety culture” that was “inhibiting the identification and resolution of technical and safety issues.”
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Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/03/science/earth/treatment-plant-for-waste-in-nuclear-cleanup-has-design-flaws-panel-says.html?_r=0
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