Reprocessing site cleanup is dirty, costly business

[struggle4progress]

By Craig Salters/ [e-mail]
Thursday, February 10, 2005

If Cape Codders want to know what might have happened had the state's Atomic Energy Commission succeeded in its plan to build a nuclear "reprocessing" facility on Camp Edwards in the early 1960s, they might want to take a look at Hanford, Wash.

Chances are, however, they won't like what they see.

A facility which can trace its roots to The Manhattan Project, Hanford used "reprocessing" - a method for extracting plutonium from nuclear materials - to supply the nation's military need for more than 40 years. In its wake, the facility left contaminated soil, unsafe drinking water and radioactive waste near the shores of the Columbia River, creating a cleanup problem that will take decades to resolve.

According to a Department of Energy Web site detailing both the ecological disaster and the steps taken to address the problem, the Hanford cleanup is "a vast, complex and expensive task - one that has often been called the world's largest environmental cleanup project." <snip>

http://www2.townonline.com/bourne/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=180692

[oneighty]

1. Ashford Hollow New York State

Under Rockefeller the nuclear fuels reprocessing facility started with a generous donation from the 'New York State Atomic and Space Authority' (Spend now pay later). J.P. Getty at one time leased the facility, walked away and left it for we the people to clean up. Oh it was not going to be a problem. So why are they still cleaning it up today?

Hell I don't know.

180

[NNadir]

2. Really? Largest environmental clean up ever?

Bigger than any and all of these disasters?

http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/mdaf.html

Bigger than the 250 million gallons of coal waste slurry that destroyed 75 miles of the Big Sandy River in Kentucky on Oct 11, 2000? Bigger than the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill? Bigger than the destruction of the earth's atmosphere?

I'll bet it's far worse than this 750 of miles of rivers in West Virginia that have been buried by slag from the tops of mountains to get at the coal. http://www.wvrivers.org/mtrrevealed.htm

There must be thousands and thousands and thousands, millions maybe, of dead people and people littering all of the area around Hanford, and vast ecological deserts, bigger than all the world's melted glaciers I'll bet. Maybe you can share the pictures with us. We'd love to see them and see how the reporter for the Cape Codder newspaper compares ecological disasters.

I'll bet your pictures (which will possibly be taken by the Cape Codder's reporter himself) will be far more impressive than this acid filled abandoned strip mine photographed from space. The town right next to this acid leaching pit would be Butte, Montana, and the barren desert surrounding this pit is the actively working strip mine that is grinding up the earth as we speak to fire coal plants.



http://www.bigskyfishing.com/Montana-Info/galleries/maps/butte-aerial.shtm

I am personally thankful to the citizens of Cape Cod by the way for their recent hard work in trying to prevent the environmental travesty of a potentially aesthetically decimating wind farm off their coast. It's nice to see that they, like anti-nuclear activists, know what is really important.

For the record, Hanford was a weapons site and one whose wastes were largely developed under experimental conditions and great secrecy and urgency.

There seems no end to the pathetic and morally indifferent musings purveyed in anti-nuclear fantasies which attempt to attach Hanford to commercial reprocessing sites, possibly because the anti-nuclear movement is running out of anything but extremely thin straws to chew on.

[Massacure]

5. Are Europe's reprocessing plants a lot cleaner than our old ones?

I would assume yes. The U.S. hasn't reprocessed since Carter.

[NNadir]

3. Whoops, apologies! The article said "clean up." No one is cleaning up

this river. It's just allowed to stay this way. Therefore the "clean up cost" is zero.




Caption: Countless headwater streams in the watershed are discolored by acid and toxic heavy metals leaking out of abandoned mines

From the link below:

"Location: West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York
Threat: Polluted drainage from abandoned coal mines
Contact: Sara Nicholas, American Rivers, [phone], [e-mail]

Thousands of abandoned mines are leaking acid and other toxic substances into streams throughout the coal country of western Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

Unless Congress reauthorizes the Abandoned Mine Land Trust Fund, ongoing efforts to treat this problem will cease and the amount of pollution reaching the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers will increase, threatening 42 public drinking water intakes, thousands of private wells, and fish and wildlife."

http://www.amrivers.org/index.php?module=HyperContent&func=display&cid=2752

[RafterMan]

4. Bet this one would have been pricey, too

But hey, it's only been burning for 45 years. It'll go out some time.

http://www.offroaders.com/album/centralia/centralia.htm

[struggle4progress]

7. I bet the Centralia fire could have been extinguished for a tiny ...

... fraction of what we've spent fighting senselessly in Iraq. Do you have any real insights regarding the politics of allocating monies for Centralia?

[struggle4progress]

6. Shall then we expect regular updates from you on the reauthorization ...

... of the trust fund? Or is this just a "Quick! Look over there!" cheapshot?

[NNadir]

8. I often participate in conversations about rivers here, if you read them.

I often participate however in conversations about rivers because I do have considerable interest in water issues, continental salt flows, and the sustainability of wetlands, estuary ecosystems, etc. I have had many conversations with Hatrack, for instance, on the status of the Glen Canyon dam on the Colorado, which the American Rivers organization ranks as the single most endangered river in the United States, mostly because it's become a giant generator. The river cited my earlier post in this thread is only the #5 most endangered river.

I have often pointed out on this website that the 500 MW generated at Glen Canyon could easily be replaced by a very small nuclear reactor, and that we could have that spectacular canyon back and however many sq kilometers is now under Lake Powell, even though the lake has been drying up as a function of global climate change.

I suppose however that if one doesn't care about rivers, if one doesn't open threads about Glen Canyon for instance because one is too busy running around screaming "radioactive!" "radioactive!" one could see my complaints about the decline of rivers as a "cheap shot."

It's pretty hard to find the time though to point up the millions of environmental tragedies associated with our energy production methods though.

There are a huge number of intellectually people who carry on mindlessly about nuclear energy, although nuclear energy would have to increase its danger by a factor of more than a million to be as dangerous as coal energy. Since I understand radioactivity, nuclear technology, issues in health physics and risk analysis, and these people clearly do not have even a remote clue, I kind of have my hands full.

The fact is, that there is no solution for this problem of the Monongahela river, no matter how much money you throw at it. It's not like someone is going to find a billion tons of concrete to seal all those leaking historical coal mines.

I am trying to prevent further tragedy. One way is to ask anti-nuclear fools, who I regard as anti-environmental fools to show me damage associated with nuclear energy that is anywhere near as large as the damage associated with grand scale hydro power or more especially with coal.

It seems incredible to me, absolutely incredible, but I have actually had complete morons tell me that coal energy is safer than nuclear energy. When I ask them to explain how on earth they could possibly say that, they begin with elaborate nonsense about "clean coal technology" (a la George Bush) and unproven, untested pie-in-the-sky nonsense about carbon sequestration, scrubbers etc. Not one of them can say where they are going to put that mercury and uranium laden coal ash once they've collected it. Not one of them ever comes up with even a ridiculous scheme for what we're going to do with billions upon billions of billions of tons of coal ash, or what we're going to put as land fill in those vast holes they've dug to get the coal out.

Mostly they'd rather tell me that, how do they put that, wait, wait I'll think of it because it's really, really funny, oh yes, I remember, "There's no solution to the 'problem' of nuclear waste."

Well nuclear energy is a proven technology. It is producing 20% of the world's electrical energy and is doing so with a tiny loss of life compared to 100% of its competitors and the few failure modes that have occurred have been exhaustively analyzed and have not been repeated. In countries where people are desperately working to see that there is a future, people are working hard to build new reactors. Like all emerging technologies and all proven technologies, it has had some failures and set backs. But still, it's been almost two decades since a major nuclear accident, and even that accident, the most serious ever, has not killed a fraction of the number of persons who die in a single week from air pollution.

I repeat again, and again, and again (and happily the chorus is getting louder year after year after year): Nuclear power saves lives.

I will now add some corallaries: Nuclear power saves ecosystems. Nuclear power saves land. Nuclear power saves rivers.

[struggle4progress]

9. My question was specific and concerned the trust fund.

[NNadir]

10. Is there some reason I am compelled to answer your questions?

You have cast a personal aspersion on my concern for rivers. I defended myself as much as I intend to by pointing out that I have frequently written and posted on the subject of river health.

In general, I have no intention of apologizing to anti-environmentalists for my environmental credentials, nor to I intend to justify to antienvironmentalists my environmentalism.

I answer questions when I regard the questions as being worthwhile, period. I feel no compunction whatsoever to cater to the needs of a subset of people who have a limited capacity to understand my answers or to those who I am certain will certainly make irrational responses to them. I am not here to respond to religious chanting. (For the record, I'm an atheist.)

I specifically asked if one of the statements that began this thread, to wit, the claim by the Cape-Codder anti-environmental reporter that Hanford is the most expensive environmental disaster ever, could be still be made in comparison to a list of say, twenty or thirty other environmental disasters listed, if ignored, related to coal and hydropower.

The answer to that question was ignored completely, for reasons I find rather obvious.

Nuclear power saves lives. This is not because nuclear power is harmless or completely without risk. It is not. Anyone would be hard pressed to show that I have ever made such a claim. Instead my claim is quite clear: It is useless to focus on the harm caused by nuclear power without examining the alternatives, and that when one makes such comparisons, nuclear power is the cleanest and safest form of energy known and readily available to the human race.

The science of risk/benefit analysis is a science that is closely connected with morality and ethics. People who ignore this science are, in my personal view, inherently immoral and inherently unethical.

I confront such people with the ideal that the truth is important, and with the idea that there is an incredible human crisis, and indeed a crisis for all living things, facing all inhabitants of this planet. I cannot eliminate the risks of these crises, of course, but I am doing what I can to ameliorate them.

[struggle4progress]

11. Focus is the key to scientific progress. If an amble from Hanford ...

... to acid runoff from old coal mines to the general topic of river health to the general topic of atheism, containing a heavy dose of accusations that others are "stupid" and have "a limited capacity to understand," pleases you, then you of course are welcome to be pleased by it. But it's not "science" or "scientific" or even "education" in any sense.

The next question that arose in my mind was: could it be a contribution to environmental politics? More precisely, are there workable alliances between people, who do not agree on everything, with respect to the issues upon which they do agree? Of course, no one is (in any sense) "obligated" to answer my questions, but I was trying to sort out whether the issue of the coal mine trust fund was raised because there was interest in addressing the issue, or whether the subject was being changed to serve other strategic ends. Since efforts to neutralize runoff from old coal mines concern a lot of people (your assertion supra to the contrary notwithstanding), it seemed a reasonable question to me. Your response, I think tellingly, is to change the subject to "religious chanting."

[NNadir]

12. Whatever.

I regard the statement about people having a limited capacity to understand as a true statement and feel no compunction to retract it. I also feel that it is educational in the sense that anti-nuclear statements are often made by people who have a poor understanding of nuclear technology specifically and energy technology in general. Part of being educated is to understand the sources of arguments. There is, for example, a vast distance between the authority of the reporter for the Cape-Codder and say, the health physicist and nuclear scientist Bernard L. Cohen. There is vast difference between me, who has purchased and read tens of thousands of dollars of books on energy systems and design and spent tens of thousands of hours calculating and thinking about the subject, and people who cruise websites casually for information.

Now let's examine whether or not I am scatterbrained:

The remark about atheism is in response to what I see as religious thinking on the part of antinuclear activists, to wit, "that nuclear power is dangerous because I say it is and that's it." This is very much like the old religious bumper sticker that read, "God said it; I believe it; and that settles it." (I believe this is the position of George W. Bush.) When I ask for evidence of either of these claims, I almost never get it. The subject gets changed or my question gets ignored. I therefore am reluctant to disavow the association.

I frequently remark on the religious nature of anti-nuclear activism because that is the only reasonable explanation for it. The notion that nuclear power is unacceptably dangerous compared to its alternatives certainly has very little experimental support. I don't regard the issues of the origins of anti-nuclear activism and religion as disconnected in any way. They may have been disconnected in 1970, when nuclear energy had very little history, but not now. In fact religious issues are involved in many environmental issues. One such issue is the demand of certain religions to "be fruitful and multiply," to oppose birth control, to cite religious justifications for resource wars, etc. I therefore stand by my use of this reference in this context. I will, in fact, probably end up repeating it often.

Now, there was phrasing in a post on this thread which referred to my discussion of acid leaching rivers as a potential "cheap shot." The inclusion of this term can hardly be represented as benign, and certainly was not about building potential alliances in environmental politics.

In any case, you cannot, on a planet inhabited by more than six billion people, be simultaneously anti-nuclear, anti-poverty, and pro-environmentalist. On a planet with one billion people, maybe; on a planet with six billion, no.

I have been studying energy on my own privately for over twenty years, and studying it intensely. None of this interest has been professional; I have done it solely because I give a damn. It's been damn hard work and I know I have upset some of my political allies and friends by my conclusions, conclusions that by the way, were at variance with my starting assumptions. But it's been worth it, though, because many real environmentalists have begun to respond to what I say in a positive way.

I know how to stop new acid leaching coal mines from being created although I don't know how to fix the thousands that already exist. I am not really interested in forming alliances with those who are, I insist, engaging in "religious chanting" in opposition to the clear and well studied solution. There is NO time for these people, because the crisis is upon us NOW. The best one can do with these people is to draw a bead on why they need to be dismissed out of hand.