Nukey Poo
July 22, 2018 8:23 PM   Subscribe

 
Greenland had a secret nuclear reactor, which, due to receding ice, is now getting exposed.
posted by eye of newt at 10:07 PM on July 22, 2018 [5 favorites]


Yet there's no explanation for that adorable nickname for something that contaminated 12k tonnes of rock and soil? Is it because it shit all over the pristine environment?
posted by arcticseal at 2:10 AM on July 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


Er, that Greenland article's content is rather at odds with its title:
They left the rest of the camp’s infrastructure – and its biological, chemical and radioactive waste – where it was, on the assumption it would be ‘preserved for eternity’ by the perpetually accumulating snow and ice.

Thus far their assumption has proven correct. Up to 12 metres deep at the time it was abandoned, the ice covering Camp Century has since thickened to around 35 metres and will continue to deepen for a while yet.
...with the inflection point, when the ice cover begins to decrease rather than increase, currently predicted for 2090.

The news is more that the government of Greenland has been smart enough to get started now on making clear it's the U.S.'s responsibility to clean it up.

(The OP article appears to state that the contamination from the Antarctic reactor was successfully cleaned up in compliance with treaty obligations, with 12,000 tonnes of contaminated rock removed and shipped back to the USA.)
posted by XMLicious at 2:11 AM on July 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


Yet there's no explanation for that adorable nickname for something that contaminated 12k tonnes of rock and soil?
The men assigned to PM-3A were part of the Naval Nuclear Power Unit, a subcommand under the Naval Facilities Engineering Command. The initials NNPU were the source of the plant’s nickname “Nukey Poo.”
posted by zamboni at 3:45 AM on July 23, 2018 [4 favorites]


TFA is pretty thin, here's more info...

Yet there's no explanation for that adorable nickname for something that contaminated 12k tonnes of rock and soil? Is it because it shit all over the pristine environment?

Along with the name of the program, it probably had something to do with the miniaturization/portability. Later on the actual radiation leaks it had in operation may have contributed to the suitability of the name.

Wikipedia: Army Nuclear Power Program (see PM-3A -- "The soil surrounding the tanks had become radioactive, so it was also removed and transported to Port Hueneme Naval Base, California, where it was incorporated into asphalt pavement.")

(Here's Idaho National Labs' [now via Wayback] report on nuclear reactor development, "Proving the Principle," including discussion of the Army's small reactors and the SL-1 accident in Chapter 15.)

1967 Report to Navy Facilities Engineering Command: "POSTIRRADIATION EXAMINATION OF THE PM-3A TYPE 1 SERIAL 2 CORE"

Recent reporting regarding radiation exposures and releases:

2011, Bellona.org: Small-scale US nuclear reactor blamed for spiking cancer rates, casting pall over Russia’s FNPP fetish

2012, Fleet Reserve Association Today (newsletter) feature: "Southern Exposure" [via pastebin b/c distributed in RTF]

2018, Stuff (NZ): Kiwis fear cancer after working near leaky US nuclear reactor in Antarctica. Short video with stills included.

But there's some debate about that, naturally.

US Defense Threat Reduction Agency & US Naval Dosimetry Center presentation 2012: Initial Assessment of Radiation Exposures of Military Personnel aboard McMurdo Station (1962 -1979) [note: large, slow loading PDF]

Final report, 2017: "Upper-Bound Radiation Dose Assessment for Military Personnel at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, between 1962 and 1979"

Atomic Insights (an industry friendly blog), from 1996: "PM-3A Design and Construction: Rapid Pace to Fulfill a Need", Valuable Tool for Antarctic Research or Costly Waste?, How Clean is Clean?, 2011: "McMurdo veterans’ cancers FAR more likely to be caused by cigarettes that by Nukey-poo" and 2013: "McMurdo Station - the NY of the Deep Freeze South."

More general material:

Power for Continent Seven, promo film by DoE/AEC from 1962. (With suitable sturm und drang.)

US AEC, PM-3A Nuclear Power Plant Program (Archived at University of North Texas)

Final Operating Report for PM-3A Nuclear Power Plant (archived at Stanford on this Intro to Nuclear Energy course site)

Antarctic Journal of the US, March 1967: Five Years of Nuclear Power at McMurdo Station (p.38-40)

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (via Google Books), Nov. 1978: Story of Nukey Poo, discussing a lot of the specific engineering goals and challenges in retrospect.


Antarctic Journal of the US, 1980: "McMurdo Station reactor site released for unrestricted use"

IEEE Spectrum, 2015: The Forgotten History of Small Nuclear Reactors

There's also a blog post that links to some additional materials (including the Bellona article above):

2002, Everything2: PM-3A: Antarctic nuclear reactor

Bill Spindler, former US Navy Title II construction inspector (Jan - Nov 2005), writing at SouthPoleStation.com -- The Antarctic Environmental Awareness Pages on Nukey Poo. Lots of photos here.


US Antarctic Program: Plaque at the former site of PM-3A ("Nukey Poo")

--

Previously related:

Unmanned nuclear-powered Soviet polar circle lighthouses (and their missing RTGs):
Lightink ze vay

Project Iceworm in Greenland:
"For obvious reasons of morale, these tunnels are not near those in which the men's dormitories are situated."

"At the Tunnels of Madness"

posted by snuffleupagus at 4:30 AM on July 23, 2018 [15 favorites]


They later switched to diesel generators, which instead of contaminating thousands of tons of soil directly beneath the base with picocuries of radioactive cesium, contaminated tens of square miles of downwind surface snow with parts-per-billion of soot.
posted by sfenders at 5:00 AM on July 23, 2018 [7 favorites]


I knew there was a reason “Nukey Poo” was my favorite Devo song.
posted by hilberseimer at 5:17 AM on July 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


The soil surrounding the tanks had become radioactive, so it was also removed and transported to Port Hueneme Naval Base, California, where it was incorporated into asphalt pavement.

Wait, what? What the actual fuck?
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 5:39 AM on July 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


Yeah, jumped out at me too.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:47 AM on July 23, 2018


I studied Physics as an undergraduate in the late 1980s / early 90s and even then - post Chernobyl, post Three Mile Island, post everything that snuffleupagus has collected in his comment above - nuclear power was still viewed, and taught, as the solution to the world's energy problems (it probably helped that my university was within 50 miles of two commercial reactors and the largest nuclear submarine base in the UK, all of whom were big employers of science and engineering graduates just like me).

The gloss finally wore off for me when I did some work at Sellafield (the British nuclear reprocessing facility, previously known as Winsdscale) and I got to see first-hand the damage done as a result of the Windscale Fire. The fire occurred in 1957 and I was contracted in the late 1990s to build and commission a radiation sensor system that would allow workers to start entering the contaminated buildings - 40 years after the accident - to start the decommissioning process. I remember sitting in the project manager's office and marvelling at his overall schedule that stretched out until 2040.
posted by KirkpatrickMac at 5:58 AM on July 23, 2018 [7 favorites]


The soil surrounding the tanks had become radioactive, so it was also removed and transported to Port Hueneme Naval Base, California, where it was incorporated into asphalt pavement.

Wait, what? What the actual fuck?


Depending on what was in it, this may not be such a horrible idea - e.g. if it's not emitting any significant gamma rays, you mostly care that people don't breath/inhale dust (which means people e.g. drilling a hole in the pavement are now exposed to the dust so it's not a real solution either but anyway). Putting my tin foil hat on for a moment, this might be a case where it was low level enough that they would just leave it in place if they didn't care about people sniffing around the isotopic signatures of the waste from their decommissioned army nuclear reactor, so they figured this is a good way of fixing it in place and keeping a permanent eye on it without spending nuclear waste storage level money.
posted by each day we work at 6:34 AM on July 23, 2018 [4 favorites]


I'm pretty sure that one of the mission briefings was titled, Don't Dig Up the Big Box of Plutonium, Mark.
posted by hearthpig at 10:19 AM on July 23, 2018


Incorporating low level radioactive waste into asphalt pavement, concrete blocks, etc. is a reasonably common (at least proposed, and in several cases implemented) method of dealing with LLRW.

At some point if you dilute it down enough, you're probably manufacturing pavement or concrete that doesn't emit more radiation than granite paving stones. Doesn't seem unreasonable.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:48 AM on July 23, 2018 [5 favorites]


If you can believe the numbers at the "How Clean is Clean?" link from snuffleupagus above, much of it wasn't anywhere near as radioactive as typical granite (according to this). It also fills in the missing explanation of how the stuff leaked out in the first place: By design. They didn't think it'd be a problem.
posted by sfenders at 1:59 PM on July 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


Natural building materials emit radiation(The background radiation levels are higher than average in Washington DC because of all the granite), so like Kadin says as long as you're making asphalt that isn't emitting more radiation than background there's nothing to worry about. From my own experience with controlling radioactive material for the US Navy a vast majority of low-level nuclear waste isn't actually radioactive but is controlled anyway because it came into contact with radioactive contamination and potentially retained some of that radiation.

Then again, we've come a long, long way from the cowboy days of the 1950s and 1960s, where "Let's build it and see how well it works" was viewed as a great way to test nuclear power plant designs. I'm not surprised they spilled a lot of radioactive waste into the soil under their retention tanks, but it pays to remember the numbers used to describe the physical amount of radioactive material involved are vanishingly small. The link doesn't actually say how much coolant was discharged into the soil (Heads up, that's how it got contaminated, they discharged primary coolant into the soil. Nuclear plants do this all the time. Sorry.) but 10 picocuries per gram is more than an order of magnitude less than what I considered radioactive contamination in the Navy and from my understanding several orders of magnitude less than what federal law calls contamination. If you took out all the actually radioactive matter they shipped off in those 12,000 tons of rocks it would comfortably fit in a thimble. A somewhat dangerous thimble, sure, but a thimble nonetheless.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 4:26 PM on July 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


Many "radioactive" substances generated by fission are only a health hazard when ingested or have a short enough half life that they become less radioactive than many common substances we are all surrounded with all of our lives within a short period of time and thus can be used in any application which will fix them in place for a few years.

Take depleted uranium as one example. Because only the stable, long lived U-238 isotope remains, there is basically no real radiation hazard associated with it. You would either have to ingest massive amounts of it or be the unluckiest person ever to have anything bad happen to you from it due to radiation.

However, being a heavy metal, it is poisonous in relatively small amounts, especially when given the chance to accumulate over time with continuous exposure, or when it gets atomized into the air and you breathe in/eat a goodly portion of it. This is why bombs and artillery shells that incorporate DU are a bad idea and have caused serious health issues among those exposed.

The point being that some things related to nuclear waste that seem like a bad idea really aren't, but some things that seem like they ought to be OK are in fact terrible.
posted by wierdo at 4:33 PM on July 23, 2018 [3 favorites]


Take depleted uranium as one example. Because only the stable, long lived U-238 isotope remains, there is basically no real radiation hazard associated with it. You would either have to ingest massive amounts of it or be the unluckiest person ever to have anything bad happen to you from it due to radiation.

This is true in the sense that the chemical toxicity is more of a concern than the radiation hazard, but in the interest of pedantry note that you don't have to go to extreme lengths to get a non-trivial exposure from DU. For example, there have been cases where people collected smaller caliber bullets from battlefields and turned them into key fobs, pendants or other kinds of souvenirs, getting measurable skin doses.
posted by each day we work at 3:05 AM on July 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


Given the 4.5 billion year half life and that it's alpha decay, I suspect contamination with other radioactive substances are the cause of any burns, not the U-238 itself. Of course, I'm assuming nobody is carrying around pounds of it in their pocket when I say this. A few grams should be less of a radiation hazard than a granite countertop.
posted by wierdo at 2:51 PM on July 25, 2018


« Older a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists   |   “Let's say you you were into making solar ovens.” Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments