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I was watching "Lost Cities: A-bomb" on History Channel On-Demand tonight (OK, I was bored). And they mentioned a couple things that got my blood boiling.

1) Pu-239 production yields 0.1% of usable Pu-239 from the end volume of radioactive byproducts.

2) When Hanford's original reactors were built, they used the Columbia River as the source and discharge for thousands of gallons a minute of Primary Cooling water. Their only "precaution" was a 6 hour holding pond. As far as I could see online, this is true. Which is why everything within 50 miles is now a Superfund site.

How freakin stupid do you have to be to discharge mass amounts of Primary Coolant from a Nuclear Reactor?

I know it was WWII, but Holy S*** that was dumb. OK, rant over.

That's pretty nuts. Power reactors today run a heck of a lot cleaner (less contamination of the primary coolant) and you still wouldn't want to do that. It just shows you how nuts the world was at the time. The war was making us crazy, then we moved on to mass production to stay ahead of the "Reds." Fortunately we have come a long way, though not nearly far enough for many I'm sure.

For those that don't know the workings of nuclear reactors:

"Primary" coolant is coolant that comes in contact with nuclear fuel.
"Secondary" coolant is in a separate pipe system that cools the Primary coolant.
"Tertiary" and other coolant are pipe systems that cool the Secondary loop.

In modern reactors, only secondary coolant is ever discharged. And that is carefully decontaminated and controlled even after use. Primary coolant discharge is an unmitigated disaster that causes cancer and three-eyed fish.

Many older military facilities are unmitigated environmental disasters. Hanford sounds about typical but with more hazardous materials. First of their kind engineering projects like Hanford are fraught with more hazards than usual because you can't learn from your predecessors' mistakes. It proabably didn't help that Hanford probably was rushed more than usual because we were concerned that Hitler would get the bomb first and put it on a V2....

Let me tell an illuminating story from work. A guy I work with's first job out of college was decontaminating a former nuclear fuel plant in the St. Louis area. They were having problems because there were radioactive wasp nests all over the place. According to accepted practice at the time, the plant put process water in ponds to remove solids before further processing/recycling. Wasps used the highly radioactive mud from the ponds to build nests around the plant and caused surprisingly widespread contamination. My co-worker's job that summer was to spend about 10 minutes every hour in a hot "space suit" knocking wasp nests down and spending the rest of the time cooling down to get ready to go back in. It was a temporary job because he got his lifetime occupational radiation exposure in one summer.

Wasps, who would've thought such a small thing would cause such a big problem. Problems that seem obvious in hindsight may not be so obvious at the time you are doing ground breaking work. The presence of unanticipated problems (famously called "unknown unknowns" by Don Rumsfeld in another context) in engineering projects is my main concern with further development of nuclear power considering what can be at stake when even small mistakes are made.

It was a temporary job because he got his lifetime occupational radiation exposure in one summer.


Wow! I guess they didn't have ALARA back then. You would have to be involved in some kind of accident in order for that to happen today. Limits on exposure are only getting lower and lower.

Wow! I guess they didn't have ALARA back then. You would have to be involved in some kind of accident in order for that to happen today. Limits on exposure are only getting lower and lower.

Not even an accident. One of my professor was an MP guarding nukes in Germany. When Chernobyl happened, he & his E-6 took a Geiger counter out to the parking lot at start of shift to see how bad the "poisonous cloud of gas" was. The meter barely pinged when waving it around the lot. The E-6 swung it past my Prof. and the needle buried itself.

that's when he decided to get a new job.

Being directly downriver (and, in winter, downwind) from Hanford, I get a chill down my spine every time I hear about this stuff. And last I heard, that was far from the worst nightmare going on at Hanford. The worst is the millions of gallons of extremely highly toxic hazardous waste sitting in corroded underground tanks. These tanks have leaked and an underground plume is slowly moving towards the Columbia. Cleaning these up is a process that will take many more years (and Billions of dollars), partly because some of this stuff may be volatile and explosive. Worst thing is they don't know what's in these tanks. Partly because records have been lost (or falsified), and partly because the chemical reactions between various chemicals (and also decomposition of unstable low-level nuclear materials) have left the contents of these tanks in a very unknown state.

Wow! I guess they didn't have ALARA back then. You would have to be involved in some kind of accident in order for that to happen today. Limits on exposure are only getting lower and lower.

The RA (reasonably acceptable) part of ALARA can be interpreted different ways depending on the situation and the interpreter. I don't know if the clean up involved was an emergency situation---my suspicion is it wasn't and that the contractor was taking advantage of the young and foolish to push worker protection regs as far as they would go. I would wager that similar "temporary" radiation work still happens in order to avoid expensive engineered controls.

Hi ILAveo:

___All I can add is the OP made a few mistakes and the dose received by today’s’ nukes is about 1/360th of that which you would pick up from natural background. I cannot say the same for Hanford as the nuclear industry still ships some waste up there but overall, the nuclear industry is about the best thing going at this point in time.

___Good Luck

___Wayne

Civillian nuclear, anyway.