ECA Update: September 30, 2014 - DOE Releases WIPP Recovery Plan
Published: Tue, 09/30/14
Department of Energy Releases WIPP Recovery Plan
DOE
September 30, 2014
Washington, D.C. - Today, the Department of Energy (DOE) released the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) Recovery Plan, outlining the necessary steps to resume operations at the transuranic waste disposal site outside of Carlsbad, N.M. WIPP operations were suspended following an underground truck fire and a radiological release earlier this year.
"Safety is our top priority," said Mark Whitney, Acting Assistant Secretary for DOE's Office of Environmental Management. "Some of the top nuclear and recovery experts from DOE and the nuclear industry helped develop this plan and I'm confident we will be able to safely and compliantly resume operations in the first quarter of 2016."
Key elements of the recovery plan include strengthening safety programs, regulatory compliance, decontamination of the underground, increasing ventilation, mine stability and underground habitability, and additional workforce retraining. The Department will continue to work closely with site regulators, including the New Mexico Environment Department and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency through implementation of the plan.
Findings and recommendations from the investigations of both the truck fire and the radiological release will be incorporated into WIPP actions moving forward. Results from additional on-going investigations into the cause of the radiological release will also be incorporated once those investigations are complete.
Community Reflects on Pivotal Moment in History with B Reactor
DOE EM News Flash
September 29, 2014
RICHLAND, Wash. - Buses carried about 200 members of the community by the remains of an old high school, bank, and other relics of former Hanford town sites once home to tens of thousands of workers who produced plutonium for the Manhattan Project, World War II, and Cold War. Next, the visitors arrived at a celebration where historians, elected officials, and others shared recollections of the national landmark known as B Reactor.
They gathered under a tent to commemorate the world's first production-scale nuclear reactor, mark exactly 70 years since its official startup at 10:48 p.m. on Sept. 26, 1944, and enjoy refreshments and music from that era by the Mid-Columbia Mastersingers.
David Klaus, Department of Energy Deputy Under Secretary for Management and Performance, who was involved in the early efforts to have the reactor recognized as a national landmark, offered remarks on behalf of DOE.
"Congratulations to everyone here for having done something so wonderful for this country," said Klaus, who noted that "the success of the B Reactor did not end with the conclusion of World War II."
Klaus was among a handful of recipients of a special award from the Hanford History Partnership for significant contributions toward the preservation of the Manhattan Project legacy.
"I can't tell you how proud I am to have been part of this with all of you," he said.
Docents, among them former B reactor workers, gave tours of the facility, which was shut down in 1968. Mindi Linquist, state director for U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, read a tribute to the B Reactor that had been entered into the Congressional record.
Del Ballard, founding member and past president of the B Reactor Museum Association, was pleased with the 70th anniversary event.
"It's great to recognize a historic facility. We've been interested in preserving the B Reactor ever since the Cold War was over and cleanup of Hanford was under way."
EM came together with the Hanford History Partnership to organize Friday's event. The organizations in the partnership that worked on the event include the Tri-City Development Council, Visit Tri-Cities, the City of Richland, and the B Reactor Museum Association.
"What's meaningful is that EM and the community partnered on an event to showcase such an important moment in our nation's history," said EM's Richland Operations Office Government Programs Manager Colleen French, who serves as the B Reactor Preservation Project Manager. "I think it exemplifies how far we've come in working together to preserve it and tell its story to future generations."
French emphasized that capturing more history from this wartime era becomes all the more necessary as years go by.
"We mark 70 years since startup of B Reactor and as more time passes, it becomes even more urgent that we find and record memories of all those associated with the Manhattan Project and Cold War," she said. "As important as facilities are, it's the people and stories that make the history come alive."
Efforts are under way across the DOE complex to preserve accounts from the people involved in the Manhattan Project and the wars that followed.
Hans Bethe, who won the Nobel Prize in physics, shared his reflections on Los Alamos and the Cold War in an interview with the Atomic Heritage Foundation's Voices of the Manhattan Project, a joint undertaking by the foundation and the Los Alamos Historical Society to create a public archive of oral history collections of Manhattan Project veterans and their families.
Heather McClenahan, the society's executive director, said history from the Manhattan Project comes in all kinds of forms.
"We have people go through their parents' basements and attics and they find artifacts or articles, or sometimes even letters, and so we collect those for our archives," McClenahan said.
Washington State University Tri-Cities in Richland works with the Richland Operations Office to consolidate oral histories in one location for public use. They also are searching for new subjects to interview, such as the residents displaced by the development of the Hanford site.
The Hanford History Partnership notes on its website that many oral Hanford stories have been collected over the past decade, including invaluable testimonies, photos, and memories of stories about settlement of the communities and farms of White Bluffs and Hanford.
"There are many more still that need to be captured and preserved before they are lost forever as older generations pass away," the website says, just above a list of forms people can use to document history.
The Difficulties of Nuclear Containment
New York Times
September 29, 2014
In December 1945, four months after atomic bombs brought an end to World War II, the United States Army published a secret report on security surrounding the Manhattan Project, the vast government effort that developed them.
Finally declassified last month by the Department of Energy, the report concludes that the project was "more drastically guarded than any other highly secret war development."
But it also makes clear that the effort was dogged by leaks and espionage, and it reveals a huge blind spot on the government's part: a lack of awareness that a wartime ally, the Soviet Union, was bent on stealing Manhattan Project secrets and developing its own nuclear bombs.
From 1943 through 1945, investigators cataloged 1,500 leaks, 200 acts of sabotage and 100 confirmed cases of espionage, but maintained that their diligence "prevented the passing of any substantial amount of project information."
Some of the episodes were serious. A suspect was fatally shot when he sped past a roadblock at a covert military base. According to other sources, eight Nazi agents tried to sabotage generating plants supplying power to atomic laboratories in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Five German spies were caught before they could steal atomic secrets.
The Manhattan Project employed nearly 400,000 people to create the first atomic weapons. The security apparatus around the effort was immense -- but according to a newly declassified report, plenty of secrets got out.
Other breaches sound harmless or merely bizarre. A few preachers in the Midwest and the South, armed with a pamphlet from a Chicago Bible college that had somehow managed to obtain highly classified information, revealed to their flocks that a mysterious new isotope named uranium 235 "promises to make all of our power sources mere child's toys by comparison" (though it would "never be powerful enough to comfort us in affliction or strengthen us in despair").
A New York engineer was fired for leaving a secret file in a telephone booth at Pennsylvania Station. The editor of a North Carolina farm journal asked the physicist Arthur Compton for some U-235 to create "a sensation in lectures he frequently gave."
The report concluded that the nation's largest military engineering endeavor had not been penetrated or compromised by "the enemy" -- though the authors seemed unaware that just three months earlier, a Soviet embassy code clerk in Canada had defected and revealed the existence of a vast spy ring that targeted military secrets.
"Officials still believed -- mistakenly -- that the atom bomb program had evaded the threat of foreign espionage," said Steven Aftergood, who directs the Federation of American Scientists' project on government secrecy.
And Richard Rhodes, the author of "The Making of the Atomic Bomb," said, "The security people, as reflected in the newly released documents, were rather more self-satisfied than they should have been."
David Greenglass was an army machinist who passed information about atomic bombs to his brother-in-law, the Soviet spy Julius Rosenberg. Credit Corbis
The report by the Army Corps of Engineers outlines the monumental scope of the security challenge, the efforts to meet it and the authors' sanguine assessment of their success.
As the Manhattan Project swung into high gear beginning in 1943, its investigators vetted 400,000 prospective employees (several thousand were rejected) and 600 companies, the declassified report said. But the urgency to develop nuclear weapons clearly trumped security.
"The emphasis was upon completing the project," the report said, "and in some cases an employee who was considered irreplaceable was retained although his loyalty was questionable."
Mounting counterintelligence operations, federal agents set up dummy companies that ostensibly sold magazine subscriptions and handled insurance adjustments. Investigators posed as exterminators, gamblers, a bellhop and an electrician (apparently not arousing suspicion even when he took almost two hours to repair a light bulb). One worked as a hotel clerk for two years.
"A crack train was held up for 30 minutes in one instance so as to allow time for agents to fly to a station to take up surveillance of a passenger," the report said, referring to an express train.
The suspects were almost all German or Nazi sympathizers -- not the Soviet spies who would actually steal the secrets that enabled them to successfully test an atomic bomb in 1949.
Whether the United States or Germany was first to develop the bomb "might decide the course of the war and be a dominant factor in the postwar peace," the report said. "The consequences of the use of atomic weapons by the enemy first were frightfully obvious should it attain its objective first."
It added, "The fact that Germany never made a large-scale effort to make an atomic bomb is proof that efforts to maintain secrecy, concerning the progress of the project, were successful."
In a later addendum, government engineers expressed concern that even if the Germans could not keep pace with the Manhattan Project, they might unleash a bomb that would disperse radioactive material -- what is called a dirty bomb today.
On Sept. 5, 1945, the Soviet code clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected in Canada. Five days later, David and Ruth Greenglass arrived in New York, where David would elaborate to his brother-in-law, the Soviet spy Julius Rosenberg, on the experimental implosion-type bomb he had described to the Soviets the previous January. "The Greenglass/Rosenberg information was the first the Soviets heard of implosion," Mr. Rhodes, the author, said, and "the Soviet program incorporated that research. That was crucial."
The disclosure from Mr. Greenglass, an army machinist stationed at Los Alamos, N.M., where the bomb was being designed, prompted the Soviets to immediately shift gears in their own bomb development. It was soon supplemented by more valuable details from rogue scientists, including Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall.
The same day the Greenglasses returned to New York, Henry Hathaway's "The House on 92nd Street," a film about the successful hunt for Nazi spies, was released in Hollywood. After production had been completed, the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The producers hastily inserted this epilogue, delivered in appropriately portentous tones:
"Process 97 -- the atomic bomb -- America's top secret, remains a secret. Not one single act of enemy-directed sabotage was perpetrated within the United States. Nor was one major secret stolen."
Small modular nuclear reactor powering PNNL, vit plant could save $300M, study says
Tri-City Herald
September 25, 2014
A study commissioned with state money shows that installing a small modular nuclear reactor for Hanford would save more money than anticipated, according to the Tri-City Development Council.
"We were skeptical of that," said Mike Lawrence, chairman of TRIDEC's Mid-Columbia Energy Initiative. "But the study by URS was very detailed in looking at it. The savings are there. They are real."
TRIDEC has not released the full study, but gave the state Legislature's Joint Select Task Force on Nuclear Energy a preliminary report on the results Thursday at the task force's meeting in Pasco.
More than 100 people packed the room -- many of them Tri-City-area nuclear and power industry professionals -- for the hearing, which focused mostly on small modular nuclear reactors for the state of Washington.
Tri-City area officials have proposed using one of the small nuclear systems to meet the increasing power needs of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Hanford nuclear reservation after the vitrification plant comes online. The Legislature budgeted $500,000 for TRIDEC to study the benefits of a small reactor system at Hanford, and the agency hired URS Corp.
An estimated $300 million could be saved by putting the small modular reactor at Energy Northwest's never-completed WNP-1 reactor site, which is on leased Hanford land, Lawrence said. A previous "soft analysis" had projected savings at $50 million.
The savings would come from using the infrastructure for the WNP-1 reactor and studies done by Energy Northwest, including for the 2012 license renewal for its Columbia Generating Station, the Northwest's only commercial nuclear power.
Using the WNP-1 site also would cut the construction schedule by about one year, in part because so much data has already been gathered, Lawrence said.
A possible $165 million more in savings could be realized through the Federal Energy Management Program, a program that allows financial savings gained from cutting carbon emissions to be used for other site projects.
Now the vitrification plant project is proposing using 45,000 gallons of diesel a day for heat to glassify waste, which makes little sense if the Department of Energy is trying to cut carbon emissions, Lawrence said. Using a small modular reactor could save $800 million, but much of that savings likely would be funneled into other Hanford projects, leaving less for the small modular reactor, he said.
Siting the small reactor near an operating commercial nuclear power plant also would allow savings from sharing services such as security and emergency response, Lawrence said.
"There is no other community in the country better suited to support a new nuclear facility than this community," he said. "We are familiar with it. We have the technical expertise."
The power needs for the Department of Energy at Hanford will more than double in the next decade as the vitrification plant starts operating to treat Hanford waste, and DOE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory also is projected to grow and have increasing power needs, according to the study results.
The federal government is interested in small modular nuclear reactors because they would be faster to build that full-size reactors, have lower startup costs, have enhanced security and safety features, and would help the nation regain technical leadership in reactor technologies, said Ray Furstenau of the DOE Office of Nuclear Energy.
The reactors are proposed to be manufactured in modules and then shipped to where they will be used, with additional modules added as demand for electricity production increases.
Advancing the small reactors, including for use at Hanford, will require DOE help, Lawrence said.
The cost to license a new nuclear design could be $1 billion, and there could be an additional $1 billion in other costs for a first-of-a-kind reactor, he said.
But DOE has the wherewithal to support renewable energy sources. It could consider loan guarantee programs and power purchase agreements, he said. He proposed a 50-50 industry and DOE cost-sharing arrangement.
The state could help by including small modular reactors in already mandated clean energy portfolios for utilities, he said. The reactors reduce carbon emissions just as wind and solar do, and provide a steady baseload power, he said.
A future reactor at Hanford would create 1,000 construction jobs and 360 operating jobs with average annual wages of about $85,000, said Gary Petersen, TRIDEC vice president of Hanford programs. But he cautioned that the nation is not likely to have a small modular reactor operating until 2023-25.
The real opportunity for the Tri-Cities is as a site to assemble small modular reactors for shipment around the world, including to Asia, where interest in the reactors is high, he said.
The Thursday meeting was the second of the nuclear task force, which includes state Sen. Sharon Brown, R-Kennewick. The panel heard from 10 invited speakers largely in support of small modular reactors or nuclear power in general, most of them from the Tri-City area, and two against from the west side of the state.
The economics for small modular reactors are not favorable, with the cost of natural gas low and the cost of solar and wind continuing to decline, said Charles Johnson of Washington and Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility. What to do with nuclear waste also remains a problem, he said.
Energy Northwest vice president Brent Ridge said nuclear provides a hedge against natural gas prices.
Nuclear waste disposal is not a technical issue, said Gerald Woodcock, representing the Eastern Washington Section of the American Nuclear Society.
"It is a political issue," he said. "It is an issue kept alive by antinuclear individuals and organizations apparently for the sole purpose of impeding the use of nuclear energy."
He was among 18 mostly Tri-City area residents who used the public comment period to speak in support of nuclear power and small modular reactors.
The task force will tour the Columbia Generating Station on Sept. 26. Internal memos reveal major safety changes at Hanford
King 5 News
September 29, 2014
A series of toxic chemical exposures at the Hanford Site is prompting stepped up safety measures at the vast nuclear cleanup site in southeastern Washington, according to documents obtained by KING 5 News.
Washington River Protection Solutions, the private company charged with managing tanks holding millions of gallons of nuclear sludge at Hanford, last week ordered workers to use respirators every time they work in the portions of the site where single-shell waste tanks are located. Prior to that change, workers could opt out of wearing respirators in many parts of the tank farms.
A series of vapor incidents that began last March has sent more than 50 workers to the hospital or the on-site medical clinic. While some workers reported only minor physical effects, others required hospital care and continue to report symptoms such as difficulty breathing, shaking and memory loss.
The mandatory respirator order came after WRPS officials saw early drafts of an expert panel's review of the vapor incidents and safety procedures at Hanford. The review was paid for by WRPS and the Dept. of Energy and headed by the federal government's Savannah River National Laboratory. The panel's report is expected to be released in the coming weeks, but WRPS President Dave Olson told employees in a Sept. 24 email that the company decided to move forward now rather than wait longer.
Current and former workers told KING 5 that the WRPS action likely indicates that the expert panel found serious flaws in how the Department of Energy and its contractors are dealing with the vapors and worker safety.
"It doesn't feel like WRPS or Department of Energy have been listening to us," said Mike Geffre, a longtime tank farm worker who retired last year.
Geffre added: "[N]ow a lab has come in and said, 'You need to listen to these people because they are getting sick for a reason. And you need to start listening to them and need to make changes and I hope this is the beginning and that there will be many more.'"
Government studies have found nearly 2,000 toxic chemicals inside the tanks -- the leftovers from the messy work of plutonium production during the Second World War and the Cold War. Caustic chemicals were used to melt uranium fuel rods from nuclear reactors at the site, then small amounts of plutonium were removed from the dissolved fuel.
Waste from the process was pumped into 177 tanks. Decades later, it remains deadly and will continue to be until the technology is developed to permanently dispose of it. The waste, hot from radioactive decay, vents toxic vapors at irregular intervals. While special filters keep radiation from escaping from the tanks, the toxic gases pass through unstopped into the atmosphere around the tank farms.
In July the Department of Energy took reporters on a tour of the site to showcase safety precautions and to report that none of its own studies had detected chemical vapors this year. Energy officials did not rule out vapor exposure as a possible cause of the workers' conditions, but stressed that no air monitoring tests had picked up signs of chemical in the air at the site.
"Our workers are not exposed to vapors, but they are having symptoms," said Energy official Tom Fletcher. "The question is: 'Why?' ... This isn't something we are taking lightly." Deal reached to pump Hanford tank
The Bellingham Herald
September 29, 2014
RICHLAND, Wash. -- A deal has been reached between officials for the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and the state of Washington to remove nuclear wastes from a leaking tank.
The deal was announced Monday between the Office of River Protection, Washington River Protection Solutions and state regulators.
Under the agreement, pumping of a double-walled tank known as AY-102 will begin no later than March 4, 2016.
Washington River Protection Solutions says it continues to monitor AY-102 and has found no evidence of waste leaking into the environment.
Hanford officials and the state have been in settlement talks since July.
The Energy Department discovered in 2012 that radioactive waste was leaking from the interior shell into the space between the shells. The waste is left from the past production of plutonium for nuclear weapons.
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