{"id":65804,"date":"2015-11-02T12:00:39","date_gmt":"2015-11-02T12:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=65804"},"modified":"2015-10-31T19:13:50","modified_gmt":"2015-10-31T19:13:50","slug":"exploding-radioactive-waste-warning-keep-it-above-ground","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/11\/exploding-radioactive-waste-warning-keep-it-above-ground\/","title":{"rendered":"Exploding Radioactive Waste Warning: Keep It above Ground"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"uranium<\/a>Early on Sunday Oct. 25 [2015], an underground fire caused an explosion in a low-level nuclear waste site in the desert 10 miles from Beatty, Nevada, and 115 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The explosion and fire followed flash flooding that shut down Beatty\u2019s escape routes: US 95 and State Highway 373. The 80-acre dumping ground, closed since 1992, is run by — get this — \u201cUS Ecology.\u201d The private dump consists of 22 trenches up to 800 feet long and 50 feet deep, and its older trenches have radioactive waste within three feet of the surface, the Las Vegas Sun reported.<\/p>\n

Certain types of radioactive material are known to catch fire when in contact with water, so the flooding that struck prior to the explosion may have been its cause. Unfortunately authorities don\u2019t know what sorts of radioactive isotopes are buried in the trenches there. Nor does anyone know either how the fire started or how much radioactive waste burned.<\/p>\n

Rusty Harris-Bishop, spokesman for the US EPA\u2019s Region 9 office in San Francisco said in a prepared statement, \u201cNo gamma radiation has been detected at this time.\u201d This nuanced remark does not indicate that gamma radiation wasn\u2019t detected. It also artfully dodges questions about alpha and beta radiation.<\/p>\n

With the EPA, the Nevada National Guard, Nye County officials and Energy Department all involved, highly nuanced public safety assurances are guaranteed. \u201cRadiation wasn\u2019t immediately detected during fly-overs of a burned trench \u2026 state and federal officials said Monday,\u201d Oct. 26. But radiation monitoring was initiated well after the plume of smoke and debris from the blast and fire had dispersed. Then, \u201cThe Nevada Department of Public Safety said tests of the area around the fire site near Beatty returned negative readings for radiation,\u201d KVVU TV reported. Well, sure. But were any positive readings returned?<\/p>\n

Video footage is at http:\/\/m.reviewjournal.com\/news\/fire-rescue\/video-shows-blasts-nuclear-waste-dump-site-shut-down-us-95<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Buried Waste Theoretically and Literally Explosive <\/strong><\/p>\n

In February 2014, at a deep underground dump in New Mexico where the Pentagon is burying plutonium-contaminated wastes, at least one barrel \u201cburst after it arrived at the dump, releasing radioactive uranium, plutonium and americium throughout the underground facility,\u201d according to NPR<\/a>. NPR\u2019s March 26, 2015 update concerned the Energy Department\u2019s 277-page report about the explosion. The report said in part, \u201cExperiments showed that various combinations of nitrate salt, Swheat Scoop\u00ae [cat litter], nitric acid, and oxalate self-heat at temperatures below 100\u00b0C.\u201d The DOE\u2019s term-of-art for this \u201cself-heat\u201d explosion was \u201cthermal runaway.\u201d This runaway explosion contaminated 22 workers internally, and it has shut down the operation, possibly forever.<\/p>\n

In May 1996, a welding spark caused a waste cask explosion at Wisconsin\u2019s Point Beach reactor on Lake Michigan. The blast of hydrogen gas was \u201cpowerful enough to up-end the three-ton lid while it was atop a storage cask filled with high-level waste.\u201d The reactor\u2019s owner called that accident merely a \u201cgaseous ignition event,\u201d but was later fined $325,000.<\/p>\n

Only 20 miles away from the Beatty Nevada explosion is the now-cancelled Yucca Mountain high-level dump project, where such waste explosions were forecast by expert investigators 20 years ago.<\/p>\n

In 1995, government physicists Charles Bowman and Francesco Venneri at Los Alamos National Laboratory predicted that wastes might erupt in a nuclear explosion and scatter radioactivity to the winds or into groundwater, or both. (Washington Post, Dec. 15, 1998; New York Times<\/em>, Mar. 5, 1995.) Bowman and Venneri found that the explosion dangers will arise thousands of years from now — after steel waste containers dissolve and plutonium begins to disperse into surrounding rock. Former Energy Dept. geologist Jerry Szymanski said, \u201cYou\u2019re talking about an unimaginable catastrophe. Chernobyl would be small potatoes.\u201d (Joby Warrick, \u201cAt Nevada Nuclear Waste Site: The Issue is One of Liquidity,\u201d Washington Post, Dec. 15, 1998)<\/p>\n

In expert hearings held in southern Ontario in Sept. 2014, Dr. Frank Greening made identical warnings about the potential explosiveness of Canadian radioactive waste if they were to be buried next to Lake Huron under plans made by Ontario Power Generation.<\/p>\n

October\u2019s waste explosion and fire shows we don\u2019t have to wait thousands of years for disaster to strike. Nevada\u2019s \u201cself-heating\u201d radioactive \u201cthermal runaway\u201d is just the latest warning not to bury radioactive waste. Putting the deadly stuff out-of-sight and out-of-mind won\u2019t keep us (or the water) safe. For radioactive waste, only above-ground, monitored, hardened, retrievable storage can come close to that goal. Ceasing nuclear waste production is the only path to potential sustainable solutions.<\/p>\n

____________________________________<\/p>\n

John LaForge, syndicated by <\/em>PeaceVoice<\/em><\/a>, works for Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog group in Wisconsin and edits its Quarterly newsletter.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Early on Sunday Oct. 25 [2015], an underground fire caused an explosion in a low-level nuclear waste site in the desert 10 miles from Beatty, Nevada, and 115 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Unfortunately authorities don\u2019t know what sorts of radioactive isotopes are buried in the trenches there. Nor does anyone know either how the fire started or how much radioactive waste burned. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[147],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65804"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65804\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}