Wrong kitty litter the culprit for WIPP Plutonium release

[Octafish]

I'm not hot dogging you. The DOE did not specify its preferred brand for its nuclear state-of-of-the-art Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP):

Wrong kitty litter the culprit for WIPP release

The contents of a failed waste barrel at the WIPP underground disposal site were "chemically incompatible", said the Department of Energy's (DOE's) technical report today, with a certain brand of cat litter playing a major role in the incident.

World Nuclear News, March 25, 2015

Without saying how the situation came about, the report explained how a mixture of nitrate salts in the waste reacted with SwheatScoop cat litter to produce heat and gases that eventually caused the barrel seal to fail. The announcement confirms rumours that circulated shortly after the release that an incorrect choice of cat litter had led to the issue.

In many industries cat litter is used as a convenient absorbant, and each barrel of waste disposed of at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) contains around 26 kg of cat litter to stabilise liquids and nitrate salts. However, SwheatScoop happens to be made from wheat and therefore contains carbohydrates which provided fuel for a chemical reaction with the metal nitrate salts being disposed of. The reaction is exothermic, which means it produces heat. The increase in temperature then accelerated the reaction, leading to a runaway effect which eventually produced enough heat and gas to overcome the barrel's vent and seal to cause a release of some radioactive material.

Although this conclusion cannot be confirmed without examining the barrel, the report said that samples of material ejected from the barrel contained sodium carbonate which was likely present as a result of the reaction described above. A truck had caught fire in WIPP only one week before the incident, but the technical report ruled this out as a factor.

WIPP is owned by the DOE and operated by Nuclear Waste Partnership and is the country's facility for the disposal of transuranic, or TRU, nuclear waste from the US military program. The waste - clothing, tools, rags, residues, debris, soil and items contaminated with small amounts of plutonium and other man-made radioactive elements - is sealed in containers and placed in panels carved out of the underground rock salt formation. The surrounding salt ensures a dry environment while natural geologic processes cause the salt to compact around the packages. Detecting the rupture via air ventilation and monitoring systems on 14 February 2014, WIPP managers evacuated the site, shut down its operation and began an investigation. No significant radioactivity reached the surface.

SOURCE: http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS-Wrong-kitty-litter-the-culript-for-WIPP-release-27030151.html

A little history: A year ago, plutonium escaped from a place it wasn't supposed to, deep within WIPP, a half-mile deep salt mine converted to store "low level" nuclear waste. A major demonstration project, WIPP is a supposedly the closest thing we have to a secure nuclear waste storage facility. Here's a PDF for: Waste Isolation Plant Documented Safety Analysis, issued a few months before th leak.

http://www.wipp.energy.gov/library/DSA/DOE_WIPP_07-3372_Rev_4_DSA.pdf

Anyway, the kitty litter failed and something unexpected happened:

PLUTONIUM LEAK DETECTED NEAR UNDERGROUND NUCLEAR WASTE PLANT

By Bob Brewin
NextGov.com, February 20, 2014

Energy Department officials confirmed that trace leaks of plutonium have been detected in the air outside the country’s only underground nuclear waste repository, located 26 miles southeast of Carlsbad, N.M.

An independent monitoring organization first detected the leaks over the weekend after an air monitor within the storage facility, the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, detected radiation. The plant stores 3.2 million cubic feet of plutonium-contaminated waste in salt caverns 2,150 feet underground.

The Carlsbad Environmental Monitoring and Research Center, operated by the College of Engineering at New Mexico State University, said earlier this week it had detected trace amounts of plutonium and americium, a radioactive isotope, in an air filter from a sampling station located northwest of the storage site.

Joe Franco, Carlsbad field office manager for Energy, confirmed at a press conference this afternoon that the leak emanated from the underground facility where waste is packed into drums stored in the salt caverns.

Franco said it will be three weeks before officials are able to return underground to assess exactly what caused the leaks. During that time, Energy will develop safety plans to deal with potential radiation, health and mining hazards.

Ryan Flynn, secretary of the New Mexico Environment Department, told reporters attending the conference that “events like this should never happen . . . one event is too many.” He criticized Energy for waiting two days to inform his office that plutonium had been detected outside the facility.

The levels of plutonium radiation detected are “well below” levels that would be harmful to people of the environment, Flynn said.

CONTINUED...

http://www.nextgov.com/health/2014/02/researchers-detect-plutonium-air-near-underground-nuclear-waste-plant/79133/

For some reason, government, academia and industry failed to warn the public about the plutonium release for two days:

Only one drum involved in WIPP release

by World Nuclear News, 13 February 2015

Photographs taken inside the underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) have confirmed that a single waste drum was the source of the contamination incident that has stopped operations at New Mexico facility since February 2014.

The information was gathered through a project known as Reach, which has been using a specially designed and manufactured 90-foot (27 meter) composite boom equipped with a high resolution camera. All this was installed on a movable cradle and mounted on a support structure, allowing operators to examine waste stacks from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall. Waste at WIPP is stacked in six columns, with each column consisting of up to three layers of transuranic waste containers.

Initial analysis of the pictures obtained by Reach indicates that no additional breached waste containers contributed to the February 2014 incident. Ted Wyka, chairman of the Department of Energy's (DOE) Accident Investigation Board (AIB), said that the evidence obtained supported the idea that a single drum, referred to as LANL68660, was the source of the radiological release.

WIPP is owned by the US Department of Energy (DOE) and operated by Nuclear Waste Partnership and is the the country's only repository for the disposal of transuranic, or TRU, nuclear waste from the US military program. The waste - clothing, tools, rags, residues, debris, soil and other items contaminated with small amounts of plutonium and other man-made radioactive elements - is sealed in containers and placed in panels carved out of the underground rock salt formation.

The radiological release took place only a week after an underground fire caused the partial shutdown of the facility. The two incidents were not related and took place in separate underground locations, but WIPP has remained out of action while the causes of both incidents are investigated and a recovery plan is implemented. The WIPP recovery plan foresees the restart of limited waste disposal operations in the first quarter of 2016.

SOURCE: http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/WR-No-further-drums-involved-in-WIPP-release-1302157.html

Why this matters? If ingested, even a microscopic amount of plutonium will cause cancer. Yet, we weren't warned about that and a lot of other stuff regarding nuclear waste, in general, and plutonium, in particular.

DOE-STD-1128-98

Guide of Good Practices for Occupational Radiological Protection in Plutonium Facilities

EXCERPT...

4.2.3 Characteristics of Plutonium Contamination

There are few characteristics of plutonium contamination that are unique. Plutonium
contamination may be in many physical and chemical forms. (See Section 2.0 for the many
potential sources of plutonium contamination from combustion products of a plutonium fire
to radiolytic products from long-term storage.) [font color="blue"]The one characteristic that many believe is
unique to plutonium is its ability to migrate with no apparent motive force. Whether from
alpha recoil or some other mechanism, plutonium contamination, if not contained or
removed, will spread relatively rapidly throughout an area. [/font color]

SOURCE (PDF file format): http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2013/11/f5/doe-std-1128-98_ch1.pdf

So, where is the technology to store plutonium and the rest of the radioactive waste from the reactors, weapons and the rest?

And Who's going to pay for it?

It's my hope this also leads to discussion of why we even need plutonium.

[Cleita]

1. I always had a fantasy that we would load all our nuclear waste on a space ship

and send it into the sun Battlestar Galactica style. I think that is probably the only safe storage for such waste. However, I'm not holding my breath waiting for the wits who are the so-called experts to try to think of something like this.

As to your question, no I don't think we need any such toxic and hazardous materials in our lives. We managed to get along without it until the last century and that is at least 50,000 years of human existence which is how long it takes for this stuff to become neutralized.

[Octafish]

2. Getting the stuff off-world is my favorite idea, too.

Space Garbage Scow idea was floated on a short-lived tee vee show, a situation comedy: Quark, starring Richard Benjamin and the Barnstable twins.

The thing about the outer space approach is, rocket launches are inherently risky. I believe Joseph Trento documented how NASA and Morton Thiokol assessed 1 in 100 solid rocket motors just blows up for reasons unknown.

The amounts of radioactive material that would have to be orbited and sent sunward are staggering, upwards of tens of thousands of tons. Wrecked Fukushima Reactor 3 alone was running with 40 tons of mixed plutoniun-uranium oxide, not counting what was in the spent fuel pool and the assorted on-site storage cannisters.



The best solution, from what I can see is to avoid nuclear power altogether. If we want to boil water to power a steam turbine to generate electricity, all we need are giant magnifying glasses.

http://www.bluebird-electric.net/Bluebird_Boats_Ships_Systems/smart_energy_harvesting_dual_axis_bluefish_zev.htm

Of course, that would pull the plug on Nuke Inc, but they could do what so many of our political leaders tell my out-of-work autoworker buddies: "Get retrained."

[Cleita]

3. The devil is in the details.

I would hope that we end toxic fuel sources altogether too. But I'm finding it a Sisyphean task. I've been trying to talk people locally into pressuring government to decommission the El Diablo nuclear plant, which sits on three earthquake faults right next to the ocean. The locals here have been so brainwashed by PG &E, the power company that operates it, that they look upon me as a cranky old lady who likes to bitch about things. They contribute to the schools, have little programs and information places to indoctrinate everyone. It's really diabolical, but at least they do admit they are having a storage problem, because they keep producing waste and are running out of places to put it.

Now Phillips Conoco, who has a refinery in the area, is trying to get a railroad spur built to bring Canadian tar sands oil through our area to the refinery. All the company spokespersons have been going to meetings telling their lies, how safe the rail cars are, and there's nothing to worry about. Union Pacific did lower the bomb that they can't refuse to transport toxic materials. I'm going to another meeting Tuesday.

[Octafish]

6. Remember when money was not a requirement to be heard? Citizens were equal under the law.

Now, the more you have, the more you can message.

Do you know TEPCO Rose? The nice Lady Barbara Judge, a former SEC lawyer and now UK regulator extraordinaire, is working via public relations science to keep the world safe for nuclear power.



The mood at Fukushima Daiichi is "fantastic."

Lady Barbara Judge: Japan's smart nuclear weapon

The head of the UK's Pension Protection Fund has been drafted in to help assure the residents of Fukushima that its reactors are safe

MARGARETA PAGANO
The Independent (UK) SUNDAY 17 FEBRUARY 2013

Lady Barbara Judge is just back from inspecting the nuclear plants at Fukushima in Japan, the ones closed down after the devastating earthquake and tsunami two years ago. She visited the control rooms at Daiichi – plant one – where three of the reactors went into meltdown and met many of the men who risked their lives by working during the emergency to cool the over-heated reactors and eventually shut them down.

It's not what she expected but the mood there was " fantastic". "What was astonishing was the optimism and hope shown by the workers that these plants can be made safe, and that they can start operating again," she says. But this was in stark contrast to the mood of the Japanese public, still in a state of shock and strongly opposed to the restoration of the nuclear programme.

Already being hailed as Japan's nuclear saviour, Lady Judge was in Fukushima with the bosses of the plants' owner, Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), which was criticised for its bungled reaction to the catastrophe. It's her first trip since being appointed deputy chairman of Tepco's new Nuclear Reform Monitoring Committee, set up after the disaster to propose a new self-regulatory structure for the industry. If all goes well, Tepco hopes to persuade the new government – said to be more favourable than the last – to restart two of the plants later this year.

SNIP...

It's her long experience of Britain's nuclear industry that attracted the Japanese, who rarely bring in outsiders, let alone a woman. Lady Judge's credentials go back to 2002 when she became a director of the UK's Atomic Energy Authority, and was then chairman for six years until 2010. She is still closely involved with the industry so, a few days after returning from Fukushima, was able to take Tepco executives to the West Midlands' Oldbury site to show how it has been decommissioned using the strictest safety protocols.

SNIP...

Yet there's one group of people who stay stubbornly anti-nuclear – women, especially the more educated ones. Wherever you are in the world, she says, all the focus groups show that it's better-off women who don't trust fission.

CONTINUED...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/lady-barbara-judge-japans-smart-nuclear-weapon-8497747.html

It seems that government service in the United States can open doors to [s]money[/s] opportunity in the United Kingdom. From the comment section at e-news we learn:

weeman
February 17, 2013 at 10:29 am

Tokyo Rose I have named her, just like the second world war the propaganda machine is on full spin cycle and we all know the false lies that they promote and brainwashing of populace.

...

Time Is Short
February 18, 2013 at 2:09 pm

Here's a big reason she was brought in:

'Radioactive Asia: There Will Be 100 Additional Nuclear Reactors in Asia in 20 Years'

http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/2013/02/radioactive-asia-there-will-be-100.html

If she's working for those that control the majority of the uranium mining/processing, you can see the money involved.

Can't let the murder of 8 billion people get in the way of third-quarter profits, can we?

...

Sickputer
February 16, 2013 at 9:20 pm

Her track record has not always been so cheery:

April 23, 2010

"WASHINGTON—Massey Energy Co., owner of a coal mine where 29 workers were killed this month, on Monday said that the board member responsible for governance had resigned because of the demands of "other ongoing business activities."

Lady Barbara Thomas Judge's resignation, effective immediately, comes amid growing criticism of the management of the Richmond, Virginia, company. For months, shareholders had complained that Lady Judge was unable to devote enough time to the job because she served on too many corporate boards. The complaints about Massey's corporate governance intensified after a coal-mine explosion two weeks ago that was the deadliest in 40 years."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703757504575195070711065984.html

Another article in 2007:

"But questions remain. Why does Lady Judge need so many jobs? How did she land her role at the UK Atomic Energy Authority, when she had no relevant experience? Is it relevant that a female friend was on the selection panel?
Lady Judge bristles. She points out that, as a lawyer, it is her job to master a subject about which she is initially ignorant. To prepare for her role at the Atomic Energy Authority, she even studied her son's physics books. She also has a strategic business role, which she is well equipped to carry out.'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-452635/Is-best-connected-woman-Britain

The monied class have zero compunction about irradiating the Northern Hemisphere, the Southern Hemisphere or any which way they slice up their planet and protect their loot with the nukes We the People have so kindly paid for.



It's getting apparent that us renters are SOL.

Keep on keeping on, Cleita. Your message is one that resonates and is remembered, because it's truth you speak.

[Cleita]

8. I often wonder in what little corner of Hell these people were

created in.

[MH1]

4. I'll admit TLDR, but SwheatScoop isn't exactly the cheapest brand of cat litter.

Standard clay litter would be far cheaper.

I wonder why they used Swheatscoop? Just had a few bags laying around? Odd.

[Brother Buzz]

5. Perhaps they had budget considerations

Use it or lose it

[MH1]

7. Maybe, but

couldn't they just buy better coffee for the staff? Sheesh, if I had budget to spend, it wouldn't be on cat litter to be used as an absorbent. (It might be for good cat litter if there were actual cats involved. But otherwise, no.)

[Brother Buzz]

9. Maybe there was a tree hugger on the staff and there were eccological considerations

SwheatScoop is biodegradable, don't you know.

[Octafish]

10. $240 Million a bag deviation from ''normal'' procedure calling for ''inorganic'' kitty litter.

Someone, somewhere, made a switch:

"Everything nuclear is proceduralized," he tells The Verge. "It’s well laid out and everything everyone does is supposed to go up and down the chain of command. When you decide on a procedure for doing something like treating this waste, you don’t deviate from it. Ever. And when someone decides to deviate, that is a bad, bad thing."

http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/23/5742800/did-kitty-litter-just-kill-the-most-successful-nuclear-waste-facility

Big mistake.

Kitty Litter Confusion Caused $240 Mln. Radiation Leak

RTTnews.com
3/27/2015 12:53 PM ET

EXCERPT...

A probe into the incident showed the particular drum to have contained absorbent Swheat Scoop kitty litter, which was incompatible with the nuclear waste contents.

Elaborating on the incident, the DOE report says the drum's chemically incompatible contents in combination with physical conditions (the configuration of the materials in the drum) supported exothermic chemical reactions leading to a thermal runaway.

As a result, there was a build-up of gases within the drum leading to the displacement of its lid, throwing out radioactive materials and hot matter that further reacted with air or other materials outside to cause the damage.

SNIP...

However, 21 individuals were found to have low-level amounts of internal contamination, and trace amounts of radioactive material were detected off-site.

SNIP...

WIPP provides permanent, underground disposal of defense-related transuranic (TRU) and TRU-mixed wastes (wastes that also have hazardous chemical components). TRU waste is contaminated with small amounts of plutonium and other TRU radioactive elements.

The accident at WIPP indefinitely suspended key operations at the site. In September, DOE estimated the cost of the initial recovery of the dump at $240 million.

CONTINUED...

http://www.rttnews.com/2475933/kitty-litter-confusion-caused-240-mln-radiation-leak.aspx

I wonder who will be named holding the bag for all this...besides the taxpayer, of course.

[hunter]

11. Cats have done more damage to the natural environment than nuclear waste.

I think I'll chalk this one up to cats.

Just kidding. Whoever used that cat litter was a dimwit. Maybe they thought they were doing something "good" for the environment using that "natural" kitty litter. Ordinary clay kitty litter is natural too. So are rattlesnake bites.

Plutonium is just one more industrial toxin among many, and most of these toxins have a "half life" of forever and are even more mobile in soils and groundwater than plutonium.

Industries are, as a matter of routine daily operations, injecting industrial toxins into the ground that are as dangerous or more dangerous than plutonium, and these toxins are showing up now, today, in the drinking water of entire communities.

The gas and oil fracking industry does it, and the chemical industry does it.

I honestly think much of the overly wrought concerns about radioactive wastes are covertly supported by these supposedly "non-nuclear" industries, especially the fracking gas industry which produces plenty of radioactive waste itself in the form of radon releases, contaminated water, and the uranium, thorium, and radium rich scale that accumulates on their pipes and equipment.

Here I must add my usual disclaimer that I am not a supporter of nuclear weapons or the nuclear power industry. I'm a Luddite, a pacifist, and a radical environmentalist. I despise most modern "economic" activity. What we call economic "productivity" today is a direct measure of the damage we do to our earth's environment and our human spirit.

Best thing we can do to preserve what's left of the natural environment we inherited is to teach everyone how to read, how to effectively use birth control, and to "work" as little as possible in industries that are especially harmful to the environment. Everyone needs more time to chill out, go for a walk, read a book, putter around in the garden, or hang out with friends at the local pub drinking locally made (not necessarily alcoholic) brews.

What am I doing this morning? I'm hanging out here on DU posting from a recycled computer while my wife sleeps in after a difficult week working in the local hospital. And it's truly a lazy day so far because I got impatient and opened a pint of my latest home-brew and it is surprisingly good. As an experiment this time I threw in a few jars of home-made jam that had been sitting on the shelf since the 2012 harvest.

In my personal life I boycott most everything. I'm a very reluctant participant in the present "consumer economy."

[Octafish]

12. Thank you, hunter. You are absolutely correct for Humanity and Planet Earth, too.

Take war, please. A few years back, I read on DU yet another thing missing from Corporate McPravda:

For the cost of Iraq War, we could've built National 100% Renewable Clean Energy Grid.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/for-the-price-of-the-iraq-war-the-u-s-could-have-a-100-renewable-power-system/5330881

The system continues as long as there's money to be made to create global powers unheard of by nations in the past, possessed by individuals today.