hanford whistle-blower backed by watchdog agency

Video - Talk by Dr. Walter Tamosaitis, the Research and Technology Manager of Hanford's Waste Treatment Plant, who was summarily terminated from his job after he raised safety issues associated with the design and operation of this nuclear facility

LATimes | Walter Tamosaitis, once a top engineer in the nation's nuclear weapons cleanup program, has been relegated to a basement storage room equipped with cardboard-box and plywood furniture with nothing to do for the last year.

Tamosaitis' bosses sent him there when he persisted in raising concerns about risks at the Energy Department's project to deal with millions of gallons of radioactive waste near Hanford, Wash., including the potential for hydrogen gas explosions.

"Walt is killing us," said Frank Russo, Bechtel Corp.'s top manager at the project, in an email to Tamosaitis' boss urging that the engineer be brought under control.

Now, an independent government watchdog agency, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, has backed up Tamosaitis and issued a rebuke to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, concluding that the safety culture at the $12.3-billion project is "flawed" and that significant risks exist in the plant's design.

The conclusion came after a nearly yearlong investigation, which took testimony from 45 witnesses and reviewed 30,000 documents. It confirmed that Tamosaitis had been "abruptly removed from the project" when he raised technical questions about its design, and that the actions against him had frightened other engineers.

"The board finds that expression of technical dissent affecting safety … were discouraged, if not opposed or rejected without review," safety board Chairman Peter Winokur wrote to Chu on June 9. "As of the writing of this finding, Dr. Tamosaitis sits in a basement cubicle in Richland with no meaningful work."

In a five-page response Friday, the Energy Department said it was "committed to continuous improvement and teamwork."

"We believe the plant can operate safely," Deputy Energy Secretary Daniel Poneman said in an interview. "I am not going to kid you, it is challenging technically."

Hanford is the nation's most contaminated piece of property, housing 56 million gallons of highly radioactive sludge in underground tanks that pose a long-term risk of leaking into the Columbia River.

The Energy Department wants to embed the waste into solid glass and ship it to a future dump, but so far not a single gallon has been treated. The project is more than 20 years behind the original schedule, and the cost has more than tripled.

"It's pitiful," said Tamosaitis, who was manager of research and technology for San Francisco-based URS Corp., a prime subcontractor to Bechtel Corp. in building the waste treatment plant.

Until he was removed from his job, Tamosaitis, 63, managed a technical staff of as many as 30 in-house scientists and engineers, and an external staff that numbered in the hundreds. He holds a doctorate in systems engineering. He spent 20 years working for DuPont Corp., running chemical plants all over the country, and then another 20 years in the nuclear cleanup industry.

Tamosaitis sent an email last year to a small circle of the top engineering experts in chemical mixing technology, raising concerns over the decision years ago to use an untested and potentially risky technology in the Hanford design.

The processing of the waste at Hanford requires a large number of mixing tanks up to 400,000 gallons in capacity where sludges, salts and liquids are separated into high-level and low-level radioactivity steams, using chemical processes and filters. More than two dozen key tanks at Hanford would use "pulse jet mixers," a system that engineers compare to turkey basters — liquid is sucked into a tube and then squirted out.

The system was supposed to be cheaper than mechanical agitators and less subject to failure, a crucial feature once the tanks are in operation and too radioactive to service. But no U.S. nuclear plant uses the technology, and Tamosaitis said there was significant doubt whether they could adequately keep the tanks mixed.

If tanks are not kept properly mixed, plutonium solids could settle at the bottom and go critical, he said. A poorly mixed tank could also result in large burps of explosive hydrogen gas. And finally, the solids could plug up pipes in the plant.

mordor...,

Der Spiegel | It was in the spring of 1962 that farmer Nels Allison first noticed something was ominously wrong. "Son of a bitch," he said to his wife. Sheep were always "the first to lie down and die" when something was amiss on Allison's farm near Basin City, a rural town near the Columbia River in the far northwestern corner of the continental United States. He started referring to that deadly night "the Night of the Little Demons."

Although the Allisons have long since passed away, the shock endures. As chronicled by journalist Michael D'Antonio in his 1993 book Atomic Harvest, their tale is one of thousands of horror stories that took place in the area surrounding Hanford, Washington, the site of America's first full-scale plutonium production facility. The site haunts the locals to this day -- and imperils them.Hanford is America's original atomic sin. At this giant facility sprawled over 586 square miles (1,517 square kilometers), a four-hour drive southeast of Seattle into the vast emptiness of Eastern Washington, the United States once produced most of its nuclear raw materials for the Cold War. Though it was decommissioned in 1988, it remains the most contaminated location in the entire Western Hemisphere.

The US Department of Energy (DOE) recently revised its timetable for Hanford's decontamination, the biggest environmental cleanup in American history. The end date was moved back, once again. It now hopes to finally wrap up this Herculean task by September 2052 -- more than 108 years after Hanford was opened.

mordor is spontaneously burping large quantities of radioactive hydrogen...,

krem | KING 5 News has learned there’s been a series of unexpected hydrogen gas releases from a tank holding radioactive waste at Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

Confidential sources say it began on March 16 and lasted for several days, much longer than usual, and they worry a single spark could have set off an explosive release of radioactivity.  

This comes two days after a report by a government panel expressing concerns about the release of flammable gasses at Hanford and the government's inability to respond to them.

Our confidential sources and government representatives are giving dramatically different versions of what has happened. Both agre a million-gallon tank holding nuclear waste at Hanford had a build-up of hydrogen gas.

Our confidential sources say it was of a magnitude larger than anything teams there have seen in at least two years and "burped" days longer than normal.

  

Workers who toil above the buried Hanford tank farms constantly monitor the tanks for gas build-ups and will conduct controlled releases to reduce pressure. We're told this was a spontaenous release, not controlled.

Hydrogen gas is constantly being produced in some tanks by the extremely high temperatures of nuclear waste. They are like dozens of underground crock pots just simmering away. Sometimes, they can boil over.

mordor, steady $$ for Bechtel, employment for the unproductive, and hell on earth for you...,

zerohedge | Engineers around the world have done a great job developing nuclear technologies to serve mankind’s many endeavors: medical devices, power generators, naval propulsion systems, or the most formidable weapons ever built, so formidable that they could largely wipe out mankind and its many endeavors.

However, engineers haven’t figured out yet what to do with the highly radioactive and toxic materials nuclear technologies leave behind. They leak through corroded containers, contaminate soil, water, and air, and after decades, we try to deal with them somehow, but mainly we’re shuffling that problem to the next generation. The enormous sums coming due over time were never included in the original costs. We’re not even talking about an accident, like Fukushima, whose costs will likely reach $1 trillion, but about maintenance and cleanup.

For example, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State, the largest, most daunting environmental cleanup project in the US. More than 11,000 people work on it. Nine relatively small reactors on that property produced plutonium, starting in 1943 through the Cold War. In 1987, the last reactor was shut down. What remains are various structures, such as the evocatively named “Plutonium Finishing Plant” (aerial photo: red “X” marks denote sections to be demolished) or the “Plutonium Vault Complex” that stored plutonium for nuclear weapons (photo of corridor).

Buried underground are 177 tanks containing 56 million gallons of highly radioactive and toxic waste. The 31 oldest tanks, made of a single layer of now rust-perforated carbon steel, have been leaking highly radioactive and toxic sludge into the ground for decades.

Hence the “Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant,” a radiochemical processing facility. In its annual report to Congress, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, which has jurisdiction over the “defense nuclear facilities” of the Department of Energy (DOE), describes the task at Hanford:

After these wastes are retrieved from the tanks, the plant will chemically separate the waste into two streams of differing radioactive hazard and solidify them into glass in stainless steel canisters. The low-radioactivity glass will be disposed of onsite, while the high-level waste glass will be shipped offsite for permanent disposal once a repository is available.

Turns out, almost none of it, according to the report, can be done safely or at all. And that “repository?” It doesn’t exist. Despite decades of trying, the US has not been able to come up with one.

as much a relic as the landscape of racism...,

vice |  Sprinkled throughout the back roads of America are the remains of Armageddon. Or what could have been Armageddon had the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union suddenly gone hot.

The ghosts of America's atomic arsenal, from development to deployment, are accessible if you know where to look: in Arizona and South Dakota, decommissioned nuclear missiles still aim skyward; in Nevada and New Mexico, the remains of nuclear testing still scar the desert; and in Tennessee and Washington state, the facilities that developed uranium and plutonium for America's nuclear bombs gather dust.

In the coming months, the National Park Service and the Department of Energy will establish the Manhattan Project National Historical Park — preserving once-secret sites at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Hanford, where scientists raced to develop the world's first atomic bomb. Public tours at these sites are already ferociously popular, selling out within days. The Park Service aims to better facilitate access to these sites to meet increasing public interest.

Yet elsewhere in the US, the ruins of the Manhattan Project and the arms race that followed remain overlooked. In North Dakota, a pyramid-like anti-missile radar that was built to detect an incoming nuclear attack from the Soviet Union pokes through the prairie grass behind an open fence. In Arizona, a satellite calibration target that was used during the Cold War to help American satellites focus their lenses before spying on the Soviet Union sits covered in weeds near a Motel 6 parking lot. And in a suburban Chicago park, where visitors jog and bird watch, nuclear waste from the world's first reactor — developed by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi for the Manhattan Project in 1942 — sits buried beneath a sign that reads "Caution — Do Not Dig."

Collectively, these sites are a visible reminder of America's nuclear history — a time when the threat of doomsday was as much a part of the landscape as the national psyche.

seppuku for the 21st century

Video - Harsh cinematic seppuku with a wooden sword.

Thiscantbehappening | Who will be the liquidators?

Whether Japan needs a few hundred volunteers to shovel boric acid on burning plutonium, or whether Japan needs 800,000 draftees, as in the Soviet Union, somebody’s got to do it.

Michio Kaku suggested the Japanese military, presumably because they are available and can fly helicopters. One could also argue that soldiers are paid to risk their lives for their country, and Japan has never needed them more.

Lets think about this, I say. The Japanese military is constitutionally forbidden to make war on anyone, so they are probably the nicest military in the world. And like every other military, it is full of young men who aren’t paid much, who haven’t lived much, who haven’t even started their families yet. Most important, Japanese soldiers bear no moral responsibility at all for the problem. Why should they die to solve it?

If someone has to die an agonizing, terrifying, nauseating, blistering, stinking, metastasizing death, who should be first guy to run into the Fukushima reactors with a bucket of wet cement?

I nominate Jeffrey Immelt.

Immelt is chairman and CEO of General Electric. General Electric designed all six of the faulty Fukushima reactors. General Electric built three of them. General Electric claimed it was safe to build these reactors next to the ocean in an earthquake zone. General Electric built 23 reactors in the United States exactly like the ones melting down right now in Japan. General Electric has made colossal profits promoting nuclear power in Japan and around the world. Jeffrey Immelt made $15.2 million last year.

He makes the most money, it’s his company, and he tells everyone else what to do. At any time since taking over GE in 2000, he could have said, “Those plants are too dangerous. We sold them to Japan. We need to shut them down.” He didn’t do that. Hence the nuclear waste in Tokyo’s drinking water belongs to Jeffrey Immelt.

This is what Immelt says on the GE website: “I’m out talking about this company seven days a week, 24 hours a day, with nothing to hide. We’re a 130-year-old company that has a great record of high-quality leadership and a culture of integrity.”

That is the statement of a moral turd. A shameless, sociopathic, moral turd. GE ran the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, one of the most polluted places on the planet. GE has paved parking lots with nuclear waste. GE has released vast clouds of radiation on innocent, unwarned people in United States just to see what would happen. GE has done radiation experiments on the testes of prisoners without properly warning them. GE dumped 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the Hudson River, making it poisonous for generations. GE has refused to clean up the PCBs in the Hudson and elsewhere. GE has lied repeatedly about the PCBs. GE is a serial polluter of ground water. GE takes enormous pride in paying no corporate taxes in the United States. GE has been fined many times for defrauding the the Defense Department. GE has been fined many times for design flaws and safety violations at its nuclear plants in the United States. GE has shipped most of its operations overseas so it can pay workers less and get fined less. GE owns a big chunk of NBC and MSNBC, which has been covering Japan less and less as the meltdown gets worse and worse. GE sees to it that all those NBC Dateline true crime documentaries don’t inform anyone about GE crimes. And last, but far from least, GE launched the political career of Ronald Reagan.

For all that, GE has been named “America’s Most Admired Company” in a poll conducted by Fortune magazine.

For all that, Jeffrey Immelt has been named Chairman of Obama’s Economic Advisory Panel.

For all that, I say give Jeffrey Immelt a one-way ticket to Fukushima and a bucket of wet cement. While he’s pouring it on the burning fuel rods, he can throw in his MBA from Harvard.

Then give another one-way ticket and bucket of wet cement to Jack Welch, who was head of GE from 1981 to 2000. He can toss his #1 best-selling autobiography, Jack: Straight from the Gut, onto the fuel rods as well.

Then the Japanese get to pick between their prime minister and the head of the Tokyo Electric Power Company. But GE should go first. It’s the honorable way. Harakiri for the 21st century.