Radioactive waste of 1966 nuclear accident found

[bananas]

http://www.expatica.com/es/articles/news/Radioactive-waste-of-1966-nuclear-accident-found.html

Radioactive waste of 1966 nuclear accident found

The leftover radioactive material was left after two US air force planes collided, spilling their nuclear payloads.

10 April 2008

MADRID - Two ditches containing radioactive material dug 42 years ago during the clean-up operation after two US air force planes collided midair spilling their nuclear payloads over southern Spain have been found, according to Teresa Mendizábal of the government-run environmental studies agency Ciemat.

"Two ditches have appeared, each 1,000 cubic metres in size, which have radioactive material that the US army left behind at the last moment and which appear in confidential reports of the Department of Energy," said Mendizábal.

One bomb fell in Palomares, Almería province, the other in the sea.

The US army said then that it had cleaned up the sites, claiming to have shipped 1.6 million tons of radioactive soil to the United States. Mendizábal said that while hundreds of US soldiers camped at the sites during the clean-up operation, they had left nuclear waste.

Even though it is still too early to know what kind of toxic waste lies in these trenches, Ciemat believes that much of the metallic material contains radioactive plutonium, which has a half-life of thousands of years.

Mendizábal explained that there is no place in Spain where the nuclear waste can be stored. Spanish authorities have turned to the United States to transport and store the toxic waste.

[Hekate]

1. Plutonium. How delightful. KnR for recognizing that this genie is out of the bottle forever.

I've come to believe that if we can't figure out how to get rid of the waste, we have no business using nuclear anything.

Hekate

[madokie]

2. I agree with that

except of course I was against nuclear waste from years ago, early '70s.

[yellerpup]

5. Me, too.

Stop Black Fox! :hi:

[madokie]

11. And it was against all odds that we did it.

the black fox site is less than twenty miles from our home here.

[yellerpup]

13. That made the victory all the sweeter.

We lived in Tulsa then. 3Mi Island shut down all debate about nuke power for years, but now it's back. It was a bad idea then & it's a bad idea now. Peace.

[Summer93]

14. I agree

I like how you put it. ....if we can't figure out how to get rid of the waste, we have no business using nuclear anything.

This then raises the question, why is this NOT being studied. If the waste could be made neutral then it would become a new issue which we could discuss.

[Fovea]

15. I fear that in a post cheap oil world

that there is going to be irresistible pressure for some sort of nuclear.

Pebble beds seem like a good short term solution. Subduction zone disposal seems like a reasonable solution.

I think that the Bussard polywell fusion stands the best chance.
Not only in terms of design, but because it is a smaller scalable design, and locality will be where its at.

There are also other sorts of fusion reactions than hydrogen, with higher input energies that supposedly are lower neutron emitters.

Serious discussions are ongoing that deuterium is highly concentrated in ice from the asteroid belt. That is one theory behind the Tunguska explosion.

[crimsonblue]

16. We do have a place for the waste...

It's called Yucca Mountain. I don't know what dream world some people live in, but any form of energy is gonna have pluses and minuses. When stored and transported properly, nuclear waste is no more dangerous for you than normal waste. Now let the flaming re's commence.

[Fovea]

17. In the long term

that is a sub optimal choice.

I think with a bit of effort, we could use the Pacific subduction zone for recycling fuel. Right back into the mantle from whence it came.

[sybylla]

21. Right, Yucca Mountain will be stable for a quarter of a million years

In what world do you live? The half-life of this stuff is unbelievable.

Half life of Uranium 235 - 700 mil years (typical nuclear reactor material)
Half life of Uranium 238 - 4 bil years (so called depleted uranium)
Half life of Plutonium 239 - 24,000 years (weapons grade)

And half life doesn't make them any more conducive to human life than now.

So name for me the oldest man-made architecture in existence on earth. Is it whole? Is it in perfect condition? Has it withstood environmental assaults and human neglect? What will remain of it in another 10,000 years?

Good grief! Poisoning our planet for millions of years is a rather significant MINUS.

[amihol]

3. There will be nuclear catastrophies in 21th century...

[phantom power]

8. No, there will be climate and energy catastrophies in the 21st century.

Nuclear energy is a tool for addressing both kinds of catastrophe, being a huge energy source that is emissions free.

[losthills]

10. When did nuclear power become emissions free?

I read the news every day, but I must have missed that story....

[Summer93]

12. Guess

At the same time that vision and dental care became COSMETIC

[gulfcoastliberal]

20. There certainly will be if they do not swiftly re-regulate these plants.

The fact is, since they've let the power companies "police themselves" has resulted in some very close calls! Like the First Energy Besse-Davis plant where acid had nearly eaten through the entire solid steel reactor head. The NRC didn't inspect the place for many years, since that's how long it would've taken for the acid to dissolve as much of steel as it did. And a plant's cooling pipe failed recently in a dramatic way. The plants are old infrastructure, thus they need extra attention and inspections, instead we're letting the power companies inspect in their own "cost effective" way. Just look at how these companies handle the security aspects of these sensitive plants. It's a joke. Very worrisome.

edit for clarity

[losthills]

4. Watch the nuclear deniers spin this one...

[phantom power]

7. Yes... let's talk about spin...

Citing a 40-year old military accident as some kind of implied argument against nuclear energy is spin.

But hey, me and Dick Cheney -- We're tight, right?

[losthills]

9. This story is just one of many examples

of how nuclear waste is not stored properly. It can't be disposed of, it remains deadly for years upon years, and the people who produce it cannot be relied upon to store it properly.

We have no idea, really, how much of this stuff is floating around out there until it bites us in the ass.

[Javaman]

18. it seems nuclear nnadir shys away from reports like this. nt

[NNadir]

23. Well, there are so many dumb fundie posts and so little time.

Fighting ignorance is a big job.

[NNadir]

22. What, exactly, is a "nuclear denier?"

Let me guess: It's someone with an education as described in fundie land.

One could imagine a similar description of say, Richard Dawkins, being put forth by Pat Robertson.

A fundie is a fundie is a fundie.

Um, speaking of your concerns for the machineries of war, exactly how much time have you spent worrying about the oil spills from the first Iraq war?

Zero?

I thought so.

The term for the concept that only nuclear energy gets attention for the use of the technology for war like purposes has a name: It's called "nuclear exceptionalism." This form of ignorance is well, exceptional, for what it, well, ignores.

All human technology is usable for warlike purposes, including things like say, food.

The number of fundie anti-nukes who are calling for banning food is, in fact, incredibly large, although the connection is subtle and over their pathetically intellectually disabled heads.

[losthills]

24. A nuclear denier is someone who pretends

that radioactive waste is not dangerous, that nuclear power is a credible solution to global warming, and that nuclear power is not associated with nuclear weapons.

[bluesmail]

6. K&R

no way to clean it up 100%, it's seeped into the earth by now. Tragic.

[Hekate]

19. Responding to some of the posters who are touting nuclear safety

San Luis Obispo has a nuclear power plant...right on a fault line, close to the sea.

It's a hundred miles north of where I live, and as of the last post-911 documentary on PBS that I saw, storage happens in these holding ponds....

None of it sounds too awfully secure to me, nor to anyone else who has ever contemplated an earthquake or small aircraft crash. I have a friend who used to live in SLO and spent a lot of time with other people trying to stop the damn thing from being built in the first place.

The last time I "believed in" nuclear energy was a long, long time ago. It all sounded like such a good idea, until I realized there was waste, a lot of it.

I live in an uncommonly beautiful area, blessed in many ways, but very vulnerable to both Nature and human activity. Fires and earthquakes are a fact of life here, just as floods and tornadoes are in other parts of the country. Then there's that nuclear plant. And we are only about 40 miles away from an Air Force base that turns out to be the hub of the electronics and satellite network for the entire military, plus they shoot off test missiles fairly regularly. Because of these two installations a lot of unmentionable stuff gets shipped up and down US 101 -- only half a mile from my doorstep, as it happens -- and that's not as safe as some seem to think, either. US 101 intermittently gets pinched off here by fire, flood (mudslide), train wreck... Oh yeah, we had a massive oil spill here in 1969, very famous, although that was actually probably not the worst thing the oil companies have done to this region.

I'm just sayin' that over the past 30 years that I've lived here I've had cause to contemplate both the fragility of living in paradise and the cost of energy.

I understand that every type of energy usage results in some form of waste, be it only dead batteries and their toxics. However, some wastes are infinitely worse than others.

We don't "need" to build any more nuclear plants. We already HAVE the technology to create mass quantities of cheap, safe energy from sun and wind. "Cheap" however may be the biggest stumbling block to getting this implemented so that it's affordable to the average homeowner, because there's so much money still to be made from the old ways. The reincarnation of Franklin Roosevelt needs to make this a #1 federal government priority, or it will not happen no matter how bad things get.

In my opinion, we don't "need" to build any more nuclear plants. Period.

Hekate