The aging underground steel tanks at the former Hanford nuclear weapons are leaking at an unprecedented rate. The Hanford Site is a mostly decommissioned nuclear production complex operated by the United States federal government on the Columbia River in the U.S. state of Washington. It has an interesting if creepy history. Established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project in the town of Hanford in south-central Washington, the site was home to the B Reactor, the first full-scale plutonium production reactor in the world. Plutonium manufactured at the site was used in the first nuclear bomb, tested at the Trinity site, and in Fat Man, the bomb that detonated over Nagasaki, Japan. Decades of nuclear weapons production have produced 56 million gallons of plutonium, cesium and other radioactive sludge that is seeping into the ground beneath. This represents one of our nations most alarming environmental emergencies. One million gallons of sludge from about a third of the 177 underground tanks have leaked into the soil, and some of it has already reached aquifers under the plateau. The Columbia River, the Wests biggest waterway, is seven miles downhill from the waste and under a worst-case scenario, could be hit by the plumes in as little as 50 years, according to the Washington State Department of Ecology. The U.S. Energy Department has known about this problem for many years and has been working for the last 24 years to develop a highly advanced 12 story facility, the size of a football field, to transform the radioactive muck into glass or vitrify it for easier disposal. Its a great idea but unfortunately has to date been an abysmal failure. After spending over 13 billion dollars, the U.S. Department of Energy officials ordered a halt to construction on the most important parts of the waste treatment plant after outside experts raised warnings that the technology for mixing the waste in processing tanks could cause dangerous buildups of explosive hydrogen gas and might allow plutonium clumps to form potentially causing a spontaneous nuclear reaction. Im all for promotion of ways to safely dispose of nuclear waste products and have been delving deeply into research on thorium reactors amongst other alternatives, but the bottom line is the sooner we end nuclear proliferation, the more time future generations will have to clean up the mess their parents left for them.
Hmmm! Drop a lot of nukes on the Middle East, melt all that sand and... Viola! Instant glass. When can we start?
what to do with it after is the burning question. Glass passivation doesn't really turn nuclear waste INTO glass, it PACKS it into leaded glass as a new container making it easier to move. Eventually that breaks down as well. Step one is to build containment facilities DIRECTLY OVER (and under) the waste dumps.. And try to mitigate in place.
If we had thorium reactors the waste could be disposed of quite easily. They do already have special breeder reactors which eat up a lot of waste even now.
At least if the stuff were stashed in Yucca Mountain, they'd have time to work out some sort of dilution technique. Every milligram of this stuff was once yellowcake uranium ore. Very dilute. Once diluted down to the same concentration of radioactive material, it can be re-introduced to the lithosphere from which it came. Sooner or later, that is what you have to do with it.
I've researched thorium until I was blue in the face and found so much conflicting information that it is difficult for me to form a final opinion on it. I've read that it is impossible to have a meltdown with a thorium reactor nor can it generate weapons grade materials. But they do create just as much waste as uranium reactors. And then I read another report that states "thorium fuel" does not exist, since thorium is not fissile. It cannot sustain a nuclear chain reaction and therefore cannot be used as fuel in a nuclear reactor. Not can it be used to make atomic bombs unless blended with a fissile material such as plutonium, that blend (called MOX fuel) can be used to run a nuclear reactor. It's the plutonium that keeps the chain reaction going. And while that is happening, the thorium-232 atoms absorb neutrons and are changed into uranium-233 (U-233) atoms. So it all comes back full circle to uranium anyway. This coincides with what I'm reading that says they create just as much waste, but the uranium they create is weapons-usable material. So how can they proclaim that thorium reactors cannot generate weapons grade materials?
Thorium reactors need a traditional reaction to start them up but once they are going they are self sustaining. Thorium produces less actinides and other wastes and wastes that are produced by uranium reactors can be eaten by thoruim reactors which will utlize it for fuel. Overall there are some technical limitations but it is inevitable and we actually had a th reactor running in the 50s or 60s.
