Ever wonder where used naval reactors go? |
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| By: BoxTurtle Thursday November 29, 2012 12:19 pm | |
http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/01/us/enterprise-scrap/index.html%3Fhpt=hp_bn1?iref=obnetwork
“According to a Navy Environmental Impact Statement, the reactors will be put on barges, floated up the Columbia River to the site of the former Hanford nuclear production complex where they will be buried in a huge trench near reactors from smaller decommissioned naval warships.”
Boxturtle (We’ll dig a hole and chuck it in and the worms crawl out and the worms crawl in)
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33 Comments
I’ll sleep better now. /s
Thanks for the post, Boxed One.
Well, Mr. Smarty Amphibian ;), just what would you do with eight teeny tiny nuclear reactors? A trench at Savannah River in South Carolina would be closer, but the Savannah River is not navigable that far up for something that size. You can’t burn them or dissolve them or flush them. I guess if you are going to tow them to a trench, the crevices of the Marianas Trench might be a positive. Given a few hundred thousand years, the subduction might drag them into the mantle and recycle them.
I’m much less worried about this that Progress Energy’s (now part of Duke Energy) plan to move the undamaged Three Mile Island reactor to supplement the nuclear plant 20 miles away from me. But that’s just the difference in geographical location.
As some people say, what could possibly go wrong?
No need to feel left out… Obama plans on giving every neighborhood its very own set of pocket fission reactors just like the ones the navy uses!…
… only these reactors will be designed and operated much more cheaply than those wasteful government units…
Wow, that’s a fracking relief.
Moving them almost right past my home. Then I get to sample the river’s treats some year’s down the road. Or should I say, down the river?
That new I-5 crossing between Oregon and Washington, the Coast Guard says it’s not high enough for all river traffic. Hopefully, it’s also not high enough for nuke barges. Oh wait! Then they get to off load, transfer around the bridge, then on load another barge.
Sigh! I’d rather not see the USN barging into my life like that!
But wait there’s more …
Have you ever wondered about all those assorted nuclear weapons? Well they’re expensive little beasties, they’re also rather delicate, and have short shelf-life. To give just one example plutonium is a softish metal. What does this mean? Well it means that components of the warhead made out of this metal have to be remachined very regularly because they quite literally get out of shape. They only get out of shape by miniscule amounts but when you’re working with microfine tolerances miniscule is enough. (And I haven’t even mentioned tritium decay, instability or reduced effectiveness of the chemical explosives used, electrical or electronic component failure, or good old-fashioned metal fatigue). Then there’s the maintenance issues associated with the missiles and delivery systems.
What we’re seeing is a feature of aging (I would prefer to say ‘declining’ but let’s not get pedantic) complex systems. Briefly, such systems have markedly higher error or failure rates at the start and end of their life-cycles. If you were to map these failures the curve of the resulting graph looks rather like a standard bath tub. Such a curve is called a Weibull curve*. In nuclear weapons such failures in components or sub-systems of the complex system that is a nuclear weapon and its delivery system is called a “significant finding” or SFI. These SFIs are monitored under the Stockpile Stewardship Program† Most SFIs are due to age related failures in the non-nuclear components but it’s taking longer for solutions to be identified than it used to. I don’t know what causes of this increasing length in the time it takes to identify solutions because for obvious reasons the details of the SFIs are classified. But it’s reasonable to assume that it’s either because:
1. The defects now emerging are presenting increasingly substantial difficulties in finding solutions.
2. Laboratories trying to find solutions don’t have enough researchers.
3. Laboratories trying to find solutions don’t have enough researchers with the right experience to find solutions quickly.
4. Some combination of 1 to 3 above.
All of this leads to the situation where as the American industrial base declines and as the costs in energy, raw materials, and highly skilled labour increase the economic burden of ensuring the continued reliability and safety of your nuclear weapons systems will go up. You should expect to see increased competition amongst the various complex systems run by the US military for the ever increasingly scarce and expensive resources needed to maintain them. Ask the Soviets how that one ends.
mfi
* You can read about the Weibull curve here:
• The Bathtub Curve and Product Failure Behavior (Part 1 of 2)
• The Bathtub Curve and Product Failure Behavior (Part 2 of 2)
† An interesting feature of this program is that an SFI is considered closed (solved) once a solution has been identified. NB: Identified not implemented just identified. I’ll just bet that knowing that makes you even happier than it does me.
mfi
We’ll dig a hole
and chuck it in
and the worms crawl out
and the worms crawl in
The worms crawl in
They crawl in thin
The worms crawl out
They crawl out stout
Yo ho! Yo ho!
Yo ho! Yo ho!
How happy we will be!
One of the great classics of English literature. Thanks for the reminder :-).
mfi
You touch on some issues with nuclear weapons few people even know exist. Degradation of the stockpile is a huge issue, the tracking of which was complicated by the Test Ban Treaty. The Lawrence Livermore National Labratory is out front on this.
The LLNL, run by the University of California at Berkley, seeks to accomplish stockpile degradation tracking with a little thing they call the National Ignition Facility. A building larger than a football field originally projected to cost about 1.5 billion the project exceeded 3 times that amount. Being a somewhat dimwitted soul the mechanics of the thing are way beyond me. What I can tell you is it involves a shitload of lasers fired at a few molecules of tritium and the resulting “explosion” gives an army of physicists a stiffy. The intensity and duration of said stiffy tells them something or other about the rate of degradation in our stockpile of nuclear weapons. At least that’s what I understand.
Yes, and that ignorance is something I find terrifying. I agree with you completely about Lawrence Livermore Nartional Laboratory being out in front on this issue. Happily they’re not alone the associate directors at Los Alamos and VP of Sandia National Laboratories have joined with LLNL’s associate directors in making a concerted push to have the NSA implement the the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program including the NIF. They’ve done so on the basis that the Stockpile Stewardship Program is dependent on outdated methodologies and technologies. I really hope they succeed.
mfi
I quoted and then became the project engineer on a large portiion of the guts of NIF. Over 2 years of serious machine time in manufacturing components. Actually toured the building during the latter phase of construction just a few weeks shy of the first test shots. I was impressed by the dedication of the team at LLNL. The DFH in me was hard pressed to justify the pride the manufacturing engineer in me experienced at seeing years of my daily grind become reality.
Oh, forgot to say, one of the stated goals of NIF was to overhaul and update the Stockpile Stewardship Program.
No problem – I took it as read :-).
It is often forgotten how many very people who are very good indeed at what they do work in organisations like LLNL, Los Alamos, Sandia, or the JPL.
Nobody could describe me as a DFH but I can still empathise :-).
mifi
What would I do with them? Well first, I’m not gonna bury them in the dirt right next to a river in a seismic zone less than 100 miles from an active volcano.
The problem is that nobody knows what to do with waste of this type. It’s all in “temporary” storage awaiting transfer to permanent storage. Which doesn’t exist even on a drawing board anymore.
Were it me, I’d shred it, put the shreds in dry cask storage, and put the dry casks somewhere in the Nevada test area.
Boxturtle (but then I don’t have to deal with Harry Reid (D-NV))
And you’re not the only one who lives around there. Anybody get their water from groundwater? You know tritium isn’t removable by ANY currently operating water purification system. And what’s a little leftover U238 among friends?
They’re using it because Hanford site is already trashed beyond recovery and they can’t make it worse. But try to get them to admit that.
Boxturtle (For those unaware, Hanford is where we produced almost all our plutonium)
For those following along, after a trip to google, I discovered that NIF is National Ignition Facility, located at LLNL.
Ah, but don’t you know? Fast breeder reactors will make it all go away. (NOT.)
I’ll see your discomfort, and raise you one:
The US doesn’t even own half of the 10′s of thousands of nuclear warheads and chemical and biological agents manufactured and stored during the last 70 years. Granted, they’re not proximal to the continental US, but it is a small closed system of a world.
Given the US is the absolute best at everything /s, if our method of maintaining and “disposing” of these lethal shit piles is a model of stupidity, what’s happening to the other 60% of them?
The threat of “Mushroom Clouds” coming out of Saddam Hussein’s non-existant weapons program was so ridiculous on its face because it was nothing compared to what an economically strapped, dissolving Soviet Union black market could delivar. And we STILL live with that possibility.
I wonder when/if the Pentagon will ever go so far as to tap that fear to sell the public on another invasion boondoggle.
Funny thing about seismic zones. The Savannah River facility (the other former bomb plant) is by the Savannah River in the Edgefield SC seismic zone. Two cases where politics dominated site selection.
I think politics has overruled engineering and safety for every atomic installation anywhere in the world. I cannot think of a reactor that was sited intelligently.
Boxturtle (Most seem located near a convenient water source. Last place we want them)
In 1993, the Russian Federation and the US signed the highly-enriched uranium purchase agreement through which the US purchased the warhead fuels from Soviet nuclear weapons decommissioned under the various START agreements, transported them to the US, reprocessed them as commercial grade fuel rods and sold them to the US nuclear power industry.
Part of the “threat of the mushroom cloud” depending on folks believing that some of Russian nuclear material was diverted on the black market or that Iraq had ties with North Korea to provide fuel or that Iraq had restarted its centrifuging program after the 1998 inspections (it hadn’t, it completely ended its nuclear ambitions then) and was sourcing yellow-cake uranium from Niger. Almost all of these pressuppositions were based on cleverly placed disinformation (and some clumsily placed disinformation) echoed by the mainstream media.
In fact, movement of nuclear materials surreptitiously is extremely difficult. The same for the equipment. It is easier to hide with the presence of a long-standing civilian nuclear industry, but signatories of the IAEA cannot escape inspections that make that difficult.
The Pentagon never reuses the same boondoggled threat. Expect a different one.
The upside is that most nations not perceiving themselves in an existential conflict with another nation or anticipating an attack from a nation that does, find that researching, developing, creating, maintaining, and storing nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons is not a effective strategy. First, they present significant dangers to your own people. Second, the hint that you are developing them, the suspicion that you are developing them paints a big target on you. Once developed, you have their deterrence value which must be maintained at a high cost. And you cannot consider using them on any scale without finding the rest of the world allied against you. Even the US has been constrained since 1945 by this awareness.
The downside is that failure of this awareness can happen very rapidly in a society that has been spooked or grown overconfident in its power as a result of possessing the “ultimate weapon”.
Oops – sorry after a while with this stuff there’s a tendency to think in acronyms. Yup NIF is indeed National Ignition Facility.
mfi
Oh I can tell you some of that but you won’t enjoy being told. I don’t know how long you’ve been around FDL so if you already know that I started out as a bomb disposal officer my apologies for boring you with the information again. To cut a long story short during the last big disarmement push officers from neutral and non-aligned countries (Ireland, Switzerland, Sweden, India, Brazil, Argentina) were often asked to tag along on visits to Soviet and American silos. The idea being that in the event of a “he said” vs “he said” dispute we could provide neutral testimony. As I’m acceptably fluent in Russian I would from time to time at very irregular (unpredicatable) intervals be jerked with a few hours notice from my usual OA (Middle East – Peace Keeper) and ordered to go on one of these excursions.
I have never ever forgotten the sights that met our eyes on many of the Soviet missile launch sites:
• Silos filled with water.
• Core components visibly misshapen.
• Missiles with large cracks running almost their entire length.
• And the launch crews. Oh God help us all, the launch crews. Conscripts, unshaven, slovenly, some of them manifestly severely hung over if not worse and most of them even more manifestly ignorant of how to launch the missiles they were supposedly responsible for. Even if they could have launched the missiles I doubt if the missiles were actually capable of exploding.
(Probably just as well. We were shown a film of what happened when the propellant the missiles used ignited out of sequences. The resulting blast crater which we were allowed inspect was … impressive).
Everything I describe above had taken place because the Soviet Union was already in a state of near-collapse and had been for a decade. . You can be sure that the American officers reported all this which is one reason why I have always considered St. Ronny the gaga’s “Star Wars” oops I mean “Strategic Defense Iniative” to be one of the most breath-takingly cynical heists ever foisted on tax payers anywhere by a pack of thieving shysters. As for “trust but verify” oh please …
Anyway there was one good upshot of all of this and that was the Nunn-Lugar programme to finance the destuction and disposal of Soviet Nuclear weapons and the storage of their fissile material under guard by well-paid and loyal troops.
Obama, Biden, Clinton and the even more worthless Panetta deserve to be strung up by their thumbs for letting this programme lapse which it will do in May of next year.
Christ!
mfi
Ummmm no, the Soviets managed it quite handily thank you.
mfi
“potatoes were guarded better”
Well, I certainly don’t enjoy the information itself, but your personal take definitely adds a degree of appreciation I wouldn’t otherwise get from some other source.
Wow.
You’re welcome. See also TarHeelDem’s comment @ 21 above. With the exception of not agreeing that it’s difficult to surreptitiously transport nuclear material (the Soviets managed it fine not everything they built fell to pieces). And with the caveat that the US did not purchase all the fissile materiel nor was it intended to he gives good information.
mfi
Wow. Just wow.
I have learned much I would rather not know from your posts. Thanks, I think.
Boxturtle (Surprised Ronnie didn’t just declare war if he knew this)
LOL you’re welcome and I do know the feeling. If it helps I still remember my facepalm moment when I realised why reverse osmosis wouldn’t get rid of tritium, to make matters worse I had the said facepalm moment just minutes after I told someone that it would and had to go scurrying after them to contradict what I’d just told them.
Red red face that day :-)
mfi
technically, you CAN get rid of tritium via distillation. But it’s very energy intensive and time consuming. I don’t know of any water system doing it.
Boxturtle (Best to pretend it’s not there)
An important concept must be understood. That is if the radioactive material can be disbursed in air or water. That would be if it is small particles. A reactor is a big chunk of metal, totally solid.
This is the exact opposite of nuclear power plant fuel which is an oxide, ie. dust. Eminently disburse-able by air or water.
The only question I have about a buried reactor vessel is rust. At it rusts then some of its mass can be disbursed.
I admit vast fuzziness about how a steel vessel becomes radioactive. What radioactive elements come to be part of said vessel and their half lives, and the degree of radioactivity of the mass.
The steel becomes radioactive via a process called neutron absorbion. The elements change. Iron, for example, will eventually turn to manganese and cobolt via iron isotopes with very short halflifes. Those will also change, and so on. Lots of nasty stuff can be made in the process.
Boxturtle (And rust is also an issue)
You down with En-Tro-Py?