A leak too far
http://www.independent.co.uk/
Tens of thousands of litres of highly radioactive liquid leaked unnoticed from a ruptured pipe at Sellafield in what the IoS can reveal was Britain’s worst nuclear accident for 13 years
Leaks have ended many careers. But few have so richly deserved to come to a premature close than the sorry history of the Sellafield Thorp reprocessing plant, Britain’s most controversial industrial installation. This leak - of some 83,000 litres of highly radioactive liquid from used nuclear fuel - is far more serious than the usual whisper in a journalist’s ear, or the passing of a furtive brown envelope. Incredibly, as we report on page one today, it went undetected for up to nine months while warning signs were missed. It amounts to Britain’s most serious nuclear incident in 13 years, and could have turned into a real catastrophe. Thorp, and the Sellafield plant as a whole, have been responsible for a scandalous catalogue of misdemeanours over the years.
But this is a leak too far. nobody is save or capable to controle nuclear power.
Reminds me of how they’re burying so many tons of nuclear waste in the American southwest. It will still be dangerous in a hundred thousand years and I wonder how they will make sure people in a hundred thousand or more years will know not to build or dig on that site. It’s not like they can post a sign or put a fence around it. It simply won’t last that long.
Nuclear anything scares me.
I work in “clean coal” research. A lot of people think that “clean coal” will save the US from being hostage to foreign oil. Others are using the dangerous politics of oil to justify clean nuclear power. I am inclined to agree that dependence on a vital resource from politically unstable regions is a terrible risk.
Everyone is desperately trying to ignore the real issues: the real issue of coal is that it is still combustion of fossil fuel no matter how cleanly it is done or how much of the ash by-product is utilised; the real issue with nuclear is still the disposal of the hot waste. The key is to use less energy. Unfortunately, free market forces have no way to drive a system to use less of anything - the primary measure of health in any economic venture is growth. Sensible government intervention in the market is critical. And, as we say around here, FTFO*.
Roger
* Figure the F’ng Odds
No, no. You’ve got it wrong. The real issue is profit, and making as much of it before the public figures out it is being duped once again, and finally stands up and does something about. Get with it!
“Clean coal” is a sort of oxymoron. It’s dirty and black and smells bad.
Cran, if you are thinking of coal as it has been used in direct home heating, yeah, you are right. Most of the western world gave that up by the 50’s or 60’s. I’m sure there are some C&F’ers who remember the deadly smogs that settled over London before home use was finally phased out. Nowadays in some areas of China, coal is processed into cylinders about the size of 1 lb coffee cans with several holes running lengthwise to promote burning. These are very commonly used in primitive stoves for heating and cooking. There are very high rates of mortality and morbidity associated with such coal use.
In the industrialized world clean coal is achievable (at least up to the CO2 bit). Mining can be done without destroying the landscape (mountain top removal does NOT qualify) and the ash product can be used to refill mines and prevent land subsidence and acid mine drainage. Ultra fine coal dust is a byproduct of coal mining and cleaning and is currently stored in slurry ponds. A dike break can lead to a significant ecological “event.” One of the groups here is working on economically recovering the coal from the pond, mixing it with wood chip waste from sawmills and making briquettes (as power plant fuel, not for barbecue).
The ash from coal fired power plants can be used for a number of building materials, including a fraction that can be substituted for a portion of the cement in concrete. This is doubly advantageous, since the manufacture of cement is an energy intensive process which produces 1/2 to 1 ton of CO2 per ton of cement. The projects I am working on fall in that group.
After proper scrubbing nearly all that goes up the stack is water and CO2. Mercury and other materials are in negligible concentrations, especially in the context of the crap that comes out of Chinese and Indian plants and the tremendous amount of material sent airborn from the underground coal mine fires in northern China. The water sent through the cooling system and used to flush the ash out of the plant is much cleaner than the Kentucky river it flows into.
CO2 is the essential problem and wishful thinkers believe that CO2 from a point source, i.e., a power plant, can be sequestered somehow. Ideally we could all drive electric cars and the CO2 produced in creating the energy needed to charge their batteries can be controlled and disposed of without being pumped into the atmosphere. I have yet to see a proposal which even shows promise of leading to safe and economical method for that.
Roger
I remember working in Colorado one year with concrete that had “fly ash” cement substitute: all our tools wore out in the first three weeks and the cement would stay too wet for too long and then suddenly set up before we could finish it nicely. “Fly ash” is a residue from nuclear reactors that was sold cheap to cement companies back in the 80’s. No one uses it around here. Contractors won’t buy it. It may be still used elsewhere, where the finish is not an issue, such as industrial walls, dams, etc. The strength is still the same as regular cement.
Has there been any progress in the reduction of sulfer dioxide? I’ve read that coal burning power plants account for nearly 90 percent of the SO2 emitted by all power plants.
This must be a typo, Lorenzo. Fly ash is a byproduct of the combustion of coal. Here’s a reference:
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Launchpad/2095/flyash.html
No one uses it around here. Contractors won’t buy it. It may be still used elsewhere, where the finish is not an issue, such as industrial walls, dams, etc. The strength is still the same as regular cement.
I am aware of it being used in quick-setting hydraulic grout. I don’t remember the exact formula, but portland cement and fly ash were major constituents. It started to set in 15 seconds.
Has there been any progress in the reduction of sulfer dioxide? I’ve read that coal burning power plants account for nearly 90 percent of the SO2 emitted by all power plants.
There are scrubbers that remove it, but they are an expensive accessory and prone to mysterious “malfunctions.” :roll: I’m not really current with the latest practices, but the last I heard low-sulfur coal was the preferred remedy.
It is in fairly wide use and some states mandate minimum amounts in state contracts. Of course, it is impossible to say why you had the problems you did twenty years ago. In general, fly ash changes the characteristics of the concrete by increasing slump and/or decreasing water demand. Test mixes must be made for each fly ash source - the composition and reactivity may vary widely so you can’t necessarily design a mix with fly ash from plant “A” and use it with fly ash from plant “B” even if they are the same type of plant burning coal from the same source. Additives may have improved over the years, and recipes for fly ash cement may also have improved. Also, in too many projects, cement comes from the ready mix plant properly prepared then someone on site decides that it “looks” like it needs more water and screws it up. When properly made, it actually reaches compressive strengths of 130% or more of ordinary portland cement (OPC) over time. The fly ash is not inert - it is actually reactive at high pH. This has another advantage of reducing the alkali silica reaction which occurs with certain aggregates and causes the cement to expand and crack. You also have to make test mixes with every fly ash - every plant produces ash with different characteristics.
I don’t know about finishing issues.
As far as scrubbers, I don’t know the exact per centage effectiveness. I do know that they have some into wider use especially since the cost of recovering and shipping Eastern coal went up and more Powder River Basin coal came on the market. With the cost of bituminous coal now up around $50/ton and unlikely to come down it pays to use the cheaper sub-bituminous and lignitic PRB coals and install scrubbers to meet clean air standards. I do know that the product of the scrubber reaction is hydrated calcium sulfate, aka gypsum, and this is being used in making wallboard in some areas.
I hope I got that right - it’s 3AM and I’m on the forum because I can’t sleep so I may have rambled on a bit.
Roger
Thanks for the details, Random, and for the link, Trad_A_Non. Back in the mid-80’s the cement companies we dealt with all believed fly ash was something that came from the stacks, incinerators, flues, or whatever you see at nuclear plants…like Hanford.
I notice in reading that the fly ash from coal is called “coal fly ash.” The ash from incinerators in England, used to dispose of garbage and to heat water, is also called fly ash. The ash that comes from volcanos is also similar in composition according to one web site. And another web site said the ancient Romans used fly ash in their concrete-like construction. Probably any ash that flies up the chimney is a type of fly ash, as opposed to the heavier type of “bottom ash” that settles first.
The reason why fly ash cement wore out our tools was probably becasue of all the glassy-like elements in ash like silica, oxides, and carbon. All our steel trowels were toast within 3 weeks, including the expensive 4 blades on power trowels. We could grind new straight edges on the hand trowels, but they’d lose about 1/8 inch off the edge every week. The cement company wouldn’t tell us what was wrong…until we switched companies. And $66 p/yd was a lot of money for cement back in '85. When we got the regular cement, from the other company, it was like night and day. It actually would flow and set up normally. We were pouring all the foundation, floors, and irrigation canals for spud cellars and potato processing plants. Some days four of us would pour 70-80 yards of flat work. In the ditches, the cement with fly ash wouldn’t even hold a vertical piece of rebar. The bar would fall over if it wasn’t held or braced. The stuff was that loose. The cement companies would always batch it out at about a 4" slump, but after driving an hour to the construction site, we always had to add more water or hire a hundred laborers to help spread it! 
Returning to the original topic, I have serious concerns regarding the use of nuclear power but for the most part they aren’t directly related to the waste disposal problem. They have more to do with arrogance, stupidity ( if that’s not redundant ), and the inherent tendency for things that have been put together to fall apart.
It is a horrid thing to hear officials, government and otherwise, saying that nothing bad can possibly happen because we have everything under control. In the first place, this can only be a political assertion and not a description of reality because there is always the unforseen. In the second, what this means is that there is a climate of opinion within the organization which will actively suppresses evidence to the contrary. In the third, it leads to complacency as inhabitants of the system are required to believe their own propaganda, and eventually do. NASA is a good, recent, non-nuclear, example of these phenomena with tragic consequences on more than one occasion – which leads me to a fourth observation: That such organizations are inherently incapable of learning from past mistakes because they will never address the institutional causes.
The inherent tendency of things put together to fall apart wouldn’t be such a big deal, were it not for the observations of the preceeding paragraph, and the fact that some dangerous waste products have half-lives in the hundreds of thousands of years. That’s a long time to guarantee that things won’t fall apart, and anyone who tries to make such a guarantee in my opinion at best doesn’t understand the problem.
Edited to add “you’re most welcome” for Lorenzo.
Interesting chat.
The main reason to why nuclear power should be avoided
- Half life of Uranium-235: 700 million years.
- Half life of radioactive rest products: up to 16 million years (neptunium-237).
- Time perspective of a politician: 1 election period.
/MarcusR
quote of German environmental minister Juergen Trittin
“If the Neanderthals had nuclear power stations we still would be dealing with their nuclear waste.”
Thinking how much the surface of the earth and the ground beneath has changed over this time, I just get upset if I hear the word “nuclear waste dumps” “Endlager and Zwischenlager” and how safe they should be for a few thousand years and more… when in reality they need some hundred thousand years to loose possibly half the dangerous radiation of them. (edit: see post above about some time frame)
If time travel ever gets possible I hope someone will come back and kick those politicians big time in their bums for making such stupid statements and for some more…
Brigitte
I don’t think our planet will be here in a few million years. The chances of total annihilation (by God, outside forces such as meteors, or inside forces such as nuclear war) are just too numerous and too great to realistically believe the planet will last for millions of years to come. It clearly won’t.
Bullpucky.
Wanna put a little money where your mouth is (and not the other way around, kid)? 
Pardon me Cran, you’re a good kid and I like you fine, but this is B.S.
Now if you want to talk about mass extinctions, you might be closer to the ballpark, but we’ve already had a few of those and the earth herself is still here.
–James
I should have mabey probably said “the world as we know it” but I didn’t want to sound like R.E.M.
If you hold humanity in such high esteem as to think we ourselves might not destroy the entire earth at some point in the next couple million years, I think that’s an erroneous view (especially with nuclear waste being stored everywhere). I don’t trust humanity that much, and I also can’t trust comets, chuncks of rock, and other such things that are flying through space as we speak. The only thing I can trust is God, but I still don’t want the earth to end anytime soon.
P.S. I’m not a kid. 
Coal vs. nuclear energy plants: take a look at this article:
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html
It claims that people living near coal fired power plants are exposed to higher radiation doses than those living near nuclear power plants. I’m not sure what to make of it.
Just kidding. You’re a child of God. They say we’re all children of God 
It’s all true unless something goes messily wrong at the nuclear plant.
I’m aware of the claims that are cited in the article, and they are doubtless correct, but I can’t get Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, etc., out of my mind. These are not issues that the author chooses to discuss. As I wrote earlier: Everything put together falls apart. ( Credit Paul Simon with the observation, if my memory is correct. ) The article reads like a propaganda piece for the nuclear industry, and also neglects entirely the waste problem – which we here have not.
It’s not the normal, day-to-day operation of nuclear plants that I worry about: It’s what happens when something goes wrong, and what to do with the trash.
Uranium and similar elements are soluble in water when in a highly oxidized state. Ground water may carry such species in solution while conditions are oxidizing, but lose them by precipitation when conditions turn reducing – as when a buried log is encountered, or some other redox front. Coal deposits originate in swamps by accumulation of plant material in extensive reducing environments. Therefore, any uranium carried in solution by water flowing into the swamp will tend to be reduced and accumulate there with the layers of buried organic matter. The uranium then becomes part of the fly ash ( of song and story ) and can be released into the atmosphere when the coal is burned.
You see, it’s all connected. 
The radiation emitted by small quantities of uranium is of such a low energy that it isn’t particularly dangerous unless it somehow gets inside the body, as when fine uranium-bearing dust is inhaled. The problem is very similar to that presented by radon, which is a gas. It’s obviously not true of a critical mass of U235, but we’re not talking about that here.
The Irish Minisister for the Environment, once again writing to the British governement to convey the irish worry about the safety record of Sellafield, compared British Nuclear fuels’ safety record with one ‘that speaks of Homer Simpson’, everybodies favourite nuclear safety inspector.
This thread started after all with a leak of radioactive material that went undetected for over eight months. It is really worth looking at the Windscale/Sellafield safetyrecord before comparing it to coal burning power stations.
