Vitrification heating up at Hanford
October 21, 2022 7:56 PM   Subscribe

The first vitrification melter at Hanford, Washington state, USA, has turned on. It also ran into some trouble and has to cool down and be debugged before getting up to working heat.

There's been nuclear waste waiting at Hanford since WWII, some of it chemically complicated stuff, and making it less dangerous is novel technology and very expensive. It could also emit toxic gases, as the untreated waste does, but the alternative is letting it leak into the Columbia River.

Also, even this is "only" the less radioactive waste, and it's been hard enough figuring out how to separate that from the more radioactive waste.

Hanford Vit Plant website
posted by clew (25 comments total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
I worked in a little research reactor in the 1980s. Our Old Guys some of them had been working in nuclear facilities since WWII and used to describe the original postwar US plans for nuclear waste -- they said (a) we expected to develop new reactor designs to use the more-radioactive fractions of spent nuclear fuel and (b) we expected to ship all these hot fuel rods across the country, regularly, to one national plant that could reprocess them all. It was going to be safe because we'd announce when the trips were and use easily identified trains and shut down traffic near them and just do it right. They couldn't remember if they assumed that no-one would mind being near the route, or the reprocessing plant, or if it seemed that the WWII planned economy would continue long enough to enforce that, or if energy "too cheap to meter" seemed like a fair trade. (Hanford's waste is partly from WWII itself, when they were worrying about losing the war and using a different risk analysis entirely.)
posted by clew at 8:08 PM on October 21, 2022 [19 favorites]


Do you guys know if this is a place of honor or not? I didn’t see any signs
posted by Countess Elena at 8:43 PM on October 21, 2022 [54 favorites]


I didn't realize they are only now getting vitrification going at Hanford, they've been talking about it since at least the 1990s.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 8:58 PM on October 21, 2022 [1 favorite]


My father in law worked on it and he retired over a decade ago.
posted by Artw at 9:00 PM on October 21, 2022 [6 favorites]


Also, in case anybody is wondering about the context of WHY they want to vitrify the waste, one of the ongoing issues with the millions of gallons of waste is that it was accumulated hastily and sloppily. Among the barrels of waste are organic materials which are breaking down and belching flammable gases, as well as fun substances that are corrosive and toxic and radioactive.

For all the flaws that the vitrification process has, cost not least among them, it should result in an end product which is both more compact and chemically much more inert. Known knowns instead of unknown unknowns.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 9:03 PM on October 21, 2022 [17 favorites]


Hanford is such a shitshow of poor planning and, just, "we got this, let's see what happens..."

Nuclear waste is just the worst.

Roll on Columbia
posted by Windopaene at 9:07 PM on October 21, 2022 [4 favorites]


Do you guys know if this is a place of honor or not? I didn’t see any signs

It used to not be, but it got better!
posted by rhizome at 9:22 PM on October 21, 2022 [3 favorites]


The ingenuity of this project is amazing, but the fact that it needs to exist is an obscenity.
posted by prismatic7 at 9:44 PM on October 21, 2022 [4 favorites]


Seconding or thirding the surprise that this is only now coming online as they've been talking about it for 30 years and spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the clean-up. I grew up here and like most of the people I knew growing up got as far away as possible as soon as I could. The leaking tanks were local talking points: a coffee roaster sold a T-106 blend. When I was in high school suddenly T-111 was the new hotness that was going to kill us all.
Let's hope this process goes smoothly and effectively.
posted by St. Oops at 10:40 PM on October 21, 2022 [16 favorites]


If you're ever in the Tri-Cities area, you can take a tour of the Manhattan Project B Reactor National Historic Landmark. I did it last month, and it was interesting and worthwhile.
posted by ShooBoo at 11:56 PM on October 21, 2022 [8 favorites]


This reminds me to call my friend who is working on decom up there, although I don't think he was directly involved in vit. He always has some excellent stories to tell. The way he tells it, one of the issues that has cropped up repeatedly in his tiny corner of the project is a poor sense of trust and partnership between engineers and ops.
posted by majick at 5:34 AM on October 22, 2022 [4 favorites]


you can take a tour of the Manhattan Project B Reactor National Historic Landmark

In grade school my class was granted the first civilian visit of the site since WWII, and toured this before they had really prepared it for visits, which was pretty cool in retrospect, though at the time it just seemed like featureless concrete caverns. They also promised to show us the "tanks" used by security, and we were all pretty bummed that they were just like armored personnel carriers.

Later in high school my anthropology class got to visit the original Hanford High School in the ghost town of old Hanford, and look for detritus from a society forced to abandon their lives and homes in a matter of weeks during the war effort. A fellow at my church growing up served as an airman during the war while his family got displaced and it took nearly 60 years before he got a chance to visit his old family farm again.

In high school cross-country a typical training run was to "the fence", demarking the site, and back. I learned to shift my truck on the road used to take submarine reactor cores out to pasture. Maybe most perversely of all a grade-school teacher had our class write letters to Reagan asking him to keep the N-reactor (the plutonium processing plant) open, to save jobs in our community. I couldn't do it.
posted by St. Oops at 9:01 AM on October 22, 2022 [10 favorites]


Visited Kennewick when the Delta wave was just gearing up, and not only was the only person anywhere wearing a mask but some fucker took the time to yell at me for it.

So, the Tri-Cities:
1) science not actually all that big a deal over there anymore.
2) fuck that place.
posted by Artw at 11:25 AM on October 22, 2022 [3 favorites]


So, to recap, (and correct me if I'm wrong) vitrification is "is the transformation of a substance into glass." And it's well known that adding metals to molten silica glass affects the color of the finished product -‌- copper makes it green, gold makes it red, cobalt makes it blue and lead makes it clear. When uranium is added, you get a pale green sometimes known as vaseline glass. No longer manufactured, but still collected, perhaps the most striking characteristic of uranium glass is when illuminated by UV, it glows a bright green. This glass was made before the difference was known between the scarce but fissionable U235 and the more benign U238.

So... these Hanford fuel rods are not now being vitrified into uranium glass, but into a glassy something that's still toxic though easier to manage.
posted by Rash at 11:44 AM on October 22, 2022 [2 favorites]


I can remember when my dad was working on the WPPSS plants at Satsop in the 1970s he brought home an informational blister card with a glass marble in it, and the card explained this was the safe future of nuclear waste. I thought it was cool, but I was 9. (It was a plain black glass blob, one assumes without any actual radioactive materiel inside...)
posted by maxwelton at 12:11 PM on October 22, 2022 [4 favorites]


So... these Hanford fuel rods are not now being vitrified into uranium glass, but into something that's still toxic though easier to manage.

The Low Activity Waste (LAW) that Hanford is going to be vitrifying contains no uranium. It's mainly for medium lived fission products like 60Co, 99Tc and 129I primarily and with lower amounts of 154Eu, 137Cs and 90Sr. They're all primarily beta decayers with a small amount of gamma emitters. This is stuff you don't want to handle directly or breathe in but it'll be stable in glass because there's no alpha emitters in the bunch. Then they'll be overpacking it in steel, and then probably clay, and it'll all be in a geologically stable rock formation.

We can't guarantee that one atom from that waste will never make it into the biosphere but it's orders of magnitude better than what we let coal plants get away with.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 12:40 PM on October 22, 2022 [16 favorites]


Hanford is such a shitshow of poor planning and, just, "we got this, let's see what happens..."

Nuclear waste is just the worst.

Roll on Columbia


With all due respect, nuclear waste is a fucking difficult problem that nobody wants to get wrong. So yeah, they're going to be careful and want to get it right and that will take time.

You want to talk the worst waste? We just let power plants have coal ash sitting in ponds. Coal ash with its trace radioactive elements and heavy metals, leaching into the ground for fucking decades. And you're complaining that people are taking the shitshow of dealing with the waste of our energy needs for modern life in a serious and methodical manner?

I get that it's still not great to pollute the environment but all of the energy we use in abundance comes from somewhere. Nuclear waste is infinitely better than any fossil fuel plant and if we had implemented widescale nuclear 40 years ago (i.e. if the Chernobyl shitshow never happened) we'd be in a way better climate change position right now. But instead we're fine with the untold number of deaths that fossil fuel pollution has caused over the last couple of centuries because they're attenuation, a background noise of asthma and lung disease, not headline grabbing numbers of deaths.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 12:48 PM on October 22, 2022 [13 favorites]


Sooo ... to keep these massive smelters running's going to take a lot of electricity, and they're not even coming close to encapsulating power generation waste. Takes a lot of fossil fuels and emits a lot of CO₂ to make all the nice things this plant needs. And this thing's 30 years late.

We're still fucked with nuclear.
posted by scruss at 5:19 PM on October 22, 2022 [1 favorite]


I am complaining. We could have required coal ash to have been properly dealt with. We did not.

Who the fuck even knows what are in all the tanks at Hanford? They only seem to have a vague idea. And they keep leaking into the Columbia. Nuclear waste is NOT better than any fossil fuel plant, because those FF plants could have been regulated to actually deal with it, but were not. But nuclear waste is going to be hazardous for far longer than coal ash.

"This is not a place of honor".

Made to keep people away for thousands, THOUSANDS of years...

And I will take solar and wind for a thousand years before I will think that nuclear is a great option for the planet and our species.

EDIT: Coal Ash ponds don't randomly blow up and spread radiation over large areas.
posted by Windopaene at 7:10 PM on October 22, 2022 [1 favorite]


Hanford has a long, dark, and still largely obscure history of deliberate releases of radioactivity into the environment.

Such as the Green Run in 1949:
The "Green Run" was a secret U.S. Government release of radioactive fission products on December 2–3, 1949 at the Hanford Site plutonium production facility, located in Eastern Washington. Radioisotopes released at that time were supposed to be detected by U.S. Air Force reconnaissance. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the U.S. Government have revealed some of the details of the experiment.[1] Sources cite 5,500 to 12,000 curies (200 to 440 TBq) of iodine-131 released,[1][2][3] and an even greater amount of xenon-133. The radiation was distributed over populated areas and caused the cessation of intentional radioactive releases at Hanford until 1962, when more experiments commenced.[3]

There are some indications contained in the documents released by the FOIA requests that many other tests were conducted in the 1940s prior to the Green Run, although the Green Run was a particularly large test. Evidence suggests that filters to remove the iodine were disabled during the Green Run.[3][4]
posted by jamjam at 1:07 AM on October 23, 2022 [1 favorite]


nuclear waste is going to be hazardous for far longer than coal ash

it’s a different sort of hazard than the higher levels of nuclear waste but it’s not as if toxic metals become less toxic over time
posted by atoxyl at 9:13 AM on October 23, 2022


Oh, I realize that. Look at the Berkeley Pit.

But remediation of toxic metals is a lot more doable than remediation of nuclear waste/contamination. And, we shouldn't have allowed that pollution to be acceptable, but we did. And we shouldn't have allowed giant, leaky, tanks to have been filled with whatever radioactive sludge they have at Hanford. But we did. Not really knowing what would happen to those tanks over time. But, nuclear secrets and all.

Not to mention nuclear power plants. How many people live near Chernobyl and Fukashima? Probably not too many these days. Nor likely for many, many, years...
posted by Windopaene at 10:13 AM on October 23, 2022


But remediation of toxic metals is a lot more doable than remediation of nuclear waste/contamination.

I mean, it's effectively the same. They both have to be put in a place that's going to be resistant to the biosphere taking it back in. In the case of toxic metal and poison remediation that's just digging out the soil and burying it in a lined landfill. A few hundred years later this could end up being someone else's problem because the lining isn't going to last forever but that's somehow acceptable for fossil fuels. Nuclear on the other hand is required to have safeguards upon safeguards because it's such a bogeyman, even though its severity of environmental impact is inversely proportional to time.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 11:04 AM on October 23, 2022


And that's before you consider the absolute shellacking we've given the environment releasing almost a teraton of CO2 into the environment over our existence. We've been working on sucking carbon back out of the biosphere for decades but we're no closer than fusion power is. Once it has diffused into the environment it's pretty much there.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 11:06 AM on October 23, 2022


As Ukraine demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt, nuclear power facilities of any kind render a country drastically more vulnerable to aggressors with ballistic missiles..

Say the US had solved all the manifold problems and established a safe repository for nuclear waste. What would happen if it took a direct hit or two from a few nukes? Many square miles of a state made uninhabitable for the foreseeable future? Followed by wave after wave of radiation sickness every time storms picked the waste up and blew it around?

The specter of war makes the MADness of nuclear power absolutely undeniable.
posted by jamjam at 1:54 PM on October 23, 2022 [1 favorite]


« Older "We are all Sisyphus and Prometheus in Michigan."   |   Let's go for a walk in the city Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments