In search of topics to talk about it, it occurred to me that in the debate about green energy, wind farms and oil, we seem to have forgotten about that other form of energy: nuclear energy, which only seems to make news after disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima, or what Iran is up to. “No news,” I suppose, is “good news” in a fashion. But there was in fact some news in regard to the Hanford nuclear site a few months ago, and not exactly good: the Department of Energy—which only “suspected” that yet another nuclear waste tank was leaking two years ago, is now “confirming” that the leakage is now past the what-nobody-knows-won’t-hurt-them stage to the merely “concerning” stage.
Some people may question the whether the discovery of radioactive properties of uranium is such a “good” thing. The Polish-born French scientist Marie Curie is widely credited with the “discovery” of radiation—although it was her husband Pierre’s “electrometer” that allowed radioactive waves to be detected and measured—and one of her “outstanding achievements,” according her Encyclopedia Britannica entry, was to recognize "the need to accumulate intense radioactive sources” to create what was necessary for use in various applications, in her time mainly for “medicinal” purposes—before those “accumulations” were needed for power plants and nuclear weapons. It is doubtful she could have foreseen nuclear weapons before she died, and had she lived she would presumably have tempered her enthusiasm for the “possibilities.” Curie won two Nobel Prizes for her work, and her remains are “enshrined” in the Paris Pantheon.
In the 1926 edition of the Britannica, Curie composed the entry on radium, which she helped discover and has intense, but short-lived, radioactive properties. She states that radium has “a special importance for scientific purposes or for medical use,” such as therapy for cancer when coupled with another recent discovery, X-rays. Curie notes that a bi-product of radium—radon, a radioactive gas—could be used for medical purposes (not, we presume, as an anesthetic, but who knows with the excitement about new discoveries of the time). She also states the following:
By incorporating radium with phosphorescent zinc sulphide it is possible to obtain luminous paints giving a weak light visible in darkness. The most important use of this paint is for watches. The quantity necessary is of the order of one-tenth of a milligramme per gramme of zinc sulphide. After several years, the phosphorescent product is altered by the action of the rays and becomes less luminous, though the quantity of radium has not changed appreciably.
We can see here that Curie’s enthusiasm for certain uses of radium seems to have been “missed” by history, and the editors of the encyclopedia felt it necessary to “pull” her entry as a reference source so as not to leave a blot on her reputation. We can say that the discovery of the radioactive properties of radium helped pave the way for the discovery of how to create “artificial” radioactivity, which led to so-called “clean” atomic power plants, and nuclear weapons, for good or ill. But there were some ideas that were clearly dangerous on the ground level and based on wishful pseudoscience.
Thus although Curie did speculate that radioactivity might prove harmful in high quantities, she couldn’t point to actual proof of how much, which seemed to satisfy her, and she and her fellow scientists remained mostly clueless as to the dangers of close contact with radioactivity over an extended period. Curie would die of aplastic anemia (some say leukemia, which is the same difference) caused by years of exposure to uncontrolled radiation, which destroyed those bodily functions that produce red blood cells. Curie’s remains are still so highly radioactive that it is interred in a lead coffin, and will remain radioactive for at least 1,500 years. Her personal effects and journals are also highly radioactive, and also stored in lead containers.
Curie’s legacy must include the following: the suggestion that radium and radon had “magical” healing properties that led to the creation of products that promised not just the “healing” of aches and pains, but to give a “dying” body “new life.” This Frankenstein monster’s most notorious product was Radithor, which was a solution of a small amount of radium, mesothorium (also radioactive), and mixed with distilled water. The most famous adherent to its “wondrous” properties was athlete and wealthy socialite Eben Byers. If you think it was crazy that a "very stable genius" like Donald Trump would suggest that "injecting" bleach into the body would "cure" COVID-19, there were “smart” people who were actually drinking this stuff:
In 1927 Byers started consuming what would end-up being 1,400 bottles of this mixture over a five-year period, first to “cure” the pain from a leg injury, and then convincing himself that it made him feel “young” again. But radiation poisoning would turn him into something out of a horror movie. By the time of his death, Byers had only two teeth protruding from what was left of his upper jaw, with his lower jaw and chin completely disintegrated. Holes in his skull exposed brain matter; his whole skeletal structure was in similar shape, and no amount of surgery could possibly save him. Byers wasn’t the only one who suffered from the effects of Radithor—including those he enthusiastically recommended it too—but he was the most “famous” victim because of his wealth and position in society.
As noted, Curie also enthused about radium’s luminous properties and its use in watches. Today, “glow in the dark” products no longer use radioactive elements, but back then it was allegedly completely “harmless.” The U.S. Radium Corporation in 1917 began marketing “luminous paint” for clocks and watches, and the Radium Dial Company followed in 1922. The infamous Radium Girls were employed to apply the paint to clock and watch dials. Told it was “safe” despite “secret” in-house studies that suggested otherwise, they were even “advised” to lick their paint brushes to make their tips finer to apply this paint.
The death of Radium Dial’s chief chemist from radiation poisoning did not stop the use of this paint, nor did the death of several of the dial painters. Because they were told the paint was safe, some of the women applied it as fingernail polish, and even on their faces for “cosmetic” purposes; just for “fun,” some reportedly even applied it to their teeth—there is no accounting for personal vanity. The first known death was in 1923, after the jaw bone of one the painters disintegrated and fell away. It is believed that over a hundred of the 4,000 or so painters eventually died from radiation poisoning, and those who lived did not receive compensation until the U.S. Supreme Court in 1939 refused to hear Radium Dial’s appeal after a series of losses in court.
Of course, you live and learn, in a fashion. Operated “safely,” we might not see any more Three Mile Islands in this country. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, there are 55 currently operating nuclear power plants with a total of 93 reactors. The last completed reactor was in 2016, with two more reactors under construction at an existing site in Georgia. There are no new power plants planned or under construction. The Grand Coulee Dam produces the most electricity of any power station in the U.S., with a peak of over 7 million megawatts during the summer, while the Palo Verde nuclear power plant with its three reactors produces a peak capacity of just under 4 million megawatts during the same span; nevertheless, the Palo Verde site produces more megawatts of power over the course of a full year. Nuclear power generation is also used in all U.S. submarines and aircraft carriers, and unlike recent Russian submarine explosions and failed missile tests, the U.S. military has not experienced “radiological incidents,” according to the World Nuclear Association.
For the most part, the ticking time bomb of nuclear energy is not so much its “safe” uses, but how to “safely” deal with what is dangerous about it. Sure this is a “big” planet, but it isn’t that big that you can hide away all of this radioactive waste in places no one lives near enough to be adversely effected by it.
So there is still that “what about.” I suspect that a growing percentage of residents of the state of Washington may have heard the word “Hanford,” they don’t exactly know what it means. In the 1940s, because it was next to a major river—the Columbia—in a relatively isolated area, Hanford was deemed a suitable location for one of the most diabolical projects in U.S. history: the production of plutonium, the main ingredient of nuclear weapons. Hanford was where the reactors were built so that the Manhattan Project scientists could conjure up their mixture of mass destruction, for later testing in actual devices in the deserts of Nevada, where a total 928 nuclear devices would be “tested,” most of them underground.
Initially shut down after WWII, Hanford was reopened in response to the Russians building their own bombs and the start of the Cold War. New reactors were constructed—bringing the total to nine devoted to the production of plutonium—and a virtual city of 50,000 workers sprang up virtually overnight. Plutonium continued to be produced there until the 1980s, when production shut down for good, with it becoming increasingly obvious that the grounds were no longer safe to live on. Most of the evidence of human habitation is long gone, and the reactors shut down. There does remain one nuclear power station not connected with the production of plutonium that remains in operation.
So, what about all that radioactive waste material, since the production of plutonium required intensified use of nuclear fuel? These are a few of the 177 tanks holding 56 million gallons of radioactive waste at Hanford:
Obviously these were not built with “long term” storage in mind—and these are only what you see above ground. Again, like Marie Curie, nobody really knew—or wanted to know—the long-term “side effects” of employing radiation outside of nature. Tanks like these have been leaking, yet there had been much debate first about using the site to store radioactive waste from other states, or in the face of anger from the locals, emptying the tanks and removing them altogether in order dig up the radioactive soil from the leaks to keep the contamination from reaching the groundwater, and even finding its way to the Columbia River.
In 2016 the Washington State Department of Ecology was claiming that the leaking tanks did not pose an imminent threat to the environment or to people, but those who actually worked at Hanford called the leaks “catastrophic.” Here is an image of the inside the notorious AY-102 tank—one of the “newer” tanks of the double-shelled variety—after the radioactive waste was removed from it because of leaking:
Pretty ugly. Despite valiant efforts to “fix” the problem, these badly corroded tanks are in need of more than band aid solutions. Just this past April when new leaks were discovered, Gov. Jay Inslee seemed to brush it off as not presenting any imminent danger to the public, for now anyways. Neither state nor federal agencies know quite what to do about this leaky tank, identified as B-109, one of the older single-shelled tanks; they are taking a “wait and see” attitude to see if radioactive contamination from the leak gets so bad they actually have to do something about it.
This is so typical of this country—there’s nothing wrong with the bridge until it actually falls down. The tank in question, as it turns out, was suspected of being susceptible to leaking in 2019. The state Department of Ecology estimated that at least 1,700 gallons of radioactive liquid waste had already leaked into the soil. Liquid waste from the B-109 tank was in the process of being “treated” and transferred to a supposedly “leak-proof” double-shelled tanks, like the aforementioned AY-102, but this has been a slow process and many of the tanks still hold liquid waste ready to seep into the groundwater, barely 200 feet below the surface:
The DOE has this scheme to transform radioactive waste into a solid “glass” form, but it can’t do this fast enough to outrun the leaking. The DOE, for its part, is refusing to build more double-shelled tanks, claiming the money is better spent trying to outrun time. As usual, there is “no problem” until disaster strikes; it take six years to design and build one of these tanks, and time is a wasting. But others who oppose building new tanks say it is just kicking the can down the road, and that the less radioactive waste should be converted into grout and shipped to Texas, where they apparently don’t care about these things, either.
Almost a third of Hanford’s tanks (57) are now believed to be leaking, despite efforts by the DOE to empty as many of the tanks of liquid contaminants as quickly as possible. Of those still with liquid waste, such as B-109, DOE claims that it will take 25 years for the deadly waste to reach groundwater—which of course doesn’t address earlier leaks, and punts the ball until they figure out what they are going to do when it does reach the groundwater. While the DOE has made efforts to pump up already contaminated water below Hanford to remove the most dangerous waste elements (see above image), others say that the waste that is seeping in the ground today will continue to threaten to contaminate the groundwater for another thousand years at least.
Some “legacy.”
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