The Tea Party Way, Governing By Extortion

[CarlV]

Gotta love the sequester.

Contractors at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the U.S.'s biggest nuclear-contamination site, plan to lay off at least 200 workers and furlough 2,500 more due to the across-the-board federal spending cuts known as the sequester, the U.S. Department of Energy said.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...592905852.html

And what are they cleaning up?

The most toxic and voluminous nuclear waste in the U.S.—208 million liters —sits in decaying underground tanks at the Hanford Site (a nuclear reservation) in southeastern Washington State. It accumulated there from the middle of World War II, when the Manhattan Project invented the first nuclear weapon, to 1987, when the last reactor shut down. The federal government’s current attempt at a permanent solution for safely storing that waste for centuries—the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant here—has hit a major snag in the form of potential chain reactions, hydrogen explosions and leaks from metal corrosion. And the revelation last February that six more of the storage tanks are currently leaking has further ramped up the pressure for resolution.
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At Hanford there were nine production reactors making plutonium and uranium fuel using at least six different radiochemical processes whose chemistry, and thus constituents, were very different. This remains true of the waste as well. There are large differences in composition from tank to tank that necessitate chemically profiling the waste in batches before it enters the Vit Plant, which may also require changes to the glass formula at the other end of the process.

Overall, the tanks hold every element in the periodic table, including half a ton of plutonium, various uranium isotopes and at least 44 other radionuclides—containing a total of about 176 million curies of radioactivity. This is almost twice the radioactivity released at Chernobyl, according to Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters, by Kate Brown, a history professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The waste is also physically hot as well as laced with numerous toxic and corrosive chemicals and heavy metals that threaten the integrity of the pipes and tanks carrying the waste, risking leakage.
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For one thing, there’s a chance that enough plutonium could congregate to trigger a nuclear chain reaction, or criticality—the self-sustaining cascade of atomic fission that releases massive amounts of energy. That would be a serious event even if an explosion did not breach the concrete containment building. Hot slurry could surge backward through the piping, spreading the problem to other parts of the system. Waste solids could also clog pipes, along with ion-exchange filters designed to grab the most radioactive constituents from the low-level waste for addition to the high-level stream.

Whether the solids pile up in the vessels, the pipes or the filters, says Donna Busche, nuclear and environmental safety manager for Hanford contractor URS Corp., “that’s where I’ve got the problem.” Further construction of the Vit Plant’s flawed components cannot proceed unless Busche issues an operating permit, which she is loath to do. She calls the DoE’s failure to require that Bechtel resolve the safety issues sooner “obscene.”

A second explosive risk could arise because both heat and radiation can disassemble water into oxygen and hydrogen. If there are not places along the piping and in the vessels for hydrogen to exit the flow of waste, enough could build up to explode.

And then there’s the extreme radioactivity of the waste, which is far too high for direct human exposure. Enter the Vit Plant’s notorious “black cells.” These are 18 massive concrete enclosures populated by smaller stainless steel vessels. The idea is to guide the waste through the vessels without any human intervention over the 40 years officials believe it will take to process all the waste. The only way to do this is to ensure that the black cells have no moving parts. But because the waste has to be constantly stirred to prevent settling of the noxious and radioactive solids, the plan calls for pulse jet mixers—described as “turkey basters”—to keep the solids suspended.
http://news.yahoo.com/hanford-nuclea...110000622.html

Yessir, that is real fixing the deficit long term.

Now go ahead and lay them all off.



Carl