hillariously bad corporate practices of radioactive materials storage horror/com

[coppercone2]

I found this horror comedy on youtube, complete with storing nuclear bomb byproducts in cardboard boxes outside





Normally I don't get surprised by the chemical industry being a bunch of scum bags but for some reason I always figured the people making nukes would have their shit together 

The way this researcher puts it, it sounds like beavis and butthead were running the show there

[Mark]

Thanks for posting these.  Decades of inaction and stupid decisions whilst dealing with some of the most dangerous materials on the planet!

[coppercone2]

I honestly think they raise the bar when it comes to bad practice.

Usually its like some poorly engineered container that at least looks kinda good, people are too busy to measure it, etc.. this is like yea we got leaking plutonium, wait 5 years.

I watched alot of industrial disaster incidents and its like poor engineering, some gauge getting stuck, some safety procedure that kept getting in the way all the time... this one just seems different

There is another knee slapper if you care to find it, about a iron/steel casting factory. There was so much accumulating of iron dust in the ceiling and it would burn as it fell down, so weird little fires were standard procedure. The back and forth between the government and the factory is hilarious too, because its not like a 'we will at least make this thing look kind of logically good'.. more like when your mom tells you to do the dishes and you splash some water on them, or better yet urinate in the sink.

[Cyberdragon]

Mass Darwinization 101.

[tombi]

Interestingly the studies of cancer in the Colorado area don't show any significant increase around the plant. Is the exposure less than they claim or is the risk lower or is there some other factor at play?

https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/cdphe/news/rocky-flats-cancer-study

[schmitt trigger]

A couple of years ago, I read the following book:

https://www.amazon.com/Full-Body-Burden-Growing-Nuclear/dp/0307955656/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1539696976&sr=8-1&keywords=rocky+flats+book

It tells a first-hand account of what was like to live in the vicinity of this facility.

Also, if you would like to read a far more chilling account of nuclear accidents:

https://www.amazon.com/Eric-Schlosser-Damascus-Accident-Illusion/dp/B00HTJT5HY/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1539697231&sr=8-2&keywords=command+and+control+nuclear+weapons%2C+the+damascus+accident

[T3sl4co1l]

Still beats the Soviets -- they dumped waste directly into a lake, not even a clay-lined dump or anything, just a natural one.  Among other horrors...

Tim

[dmills]

The LANL review of criticality accidents is also interesting for the many, many ways to feed the fuckup fairy when it comes to this stuff.

There was a criticality due to contaminated vacuum pump oil (Yes, the mass in the oil was sufficient to take the container of pump oil critical).

One Soviet site is known to have had IIRC no less then three accidental criticality incidents in a YEAR, one of them in a rig intended to measure the chemistry to reduce the risk of such things...

Yes, duckies, when you change the geometry of the container holding the plutonium solution (say by tilting it) so that the stuff all runs to one side and the surface are a goes down, well, that would be known as an 'unfavourable configuration", it is generally a bad idea.
Yes, draining the vessel using a valve into 1L containers and moving them separately is slower then using a 25L drum, **BUT THERE WAS A REASON THE INSTRUCTIONS SAID TO DO IT THAT WAY**, some amazing stuff went on during the cold war on both sides of the curtain. 

There is also a most amusing back and forth between the airfarce and the national lab concerning the cleanup after a fire in a missile silo that destroyed the warhead, with the airface trying to get the national lab to classify the concrete rubble based on its **AVERAGE** contamination, and the national lab pointing out that there would be bits **MUCH** hotter then average as something like 100g or so of special material was unaccounted for.

Some of the old public documents are fascinating.

Regards, Dan.

[schmitt trigger]

There is a saying that the only nuclear casualties during the cold war, were those of the workers related to all the different aspects of its manufacture and use.

Dan; the criticallity incident in the Soviet Union that you refer to, was that the Mayak one?

[dmills]

I would have to check, but that sounds right.

I also seem to recall at least one or two accidental PU bomb core criticality events in the soviet union which did not make that list, dangerous shit to play with.

It was surprising how many of these prompt criticalities had the operators walk away with non lethal doses, it didn't always pan out that way, but a surprisingly high percentage of the time the guys who were working on the thing took modest doses.

Regards, Dan.

[N2IXK]

There is another knee slapper if you care to find it, about a iron/steel casting factory. There was so much accumulating of iron dust in the ceiling and it would burn as it fell down, so weird little fires were standard procedure. The back and forth between the government and the factory is hilarious too, because its not like a 'we will at least make this thing look kind of logically good'.. more like when your mom tells you to do the dishes and you splash some water on them, or better yet urinate in the sink.

That would be this one:



The other videos posted under that account are WELL worth watching if you want to see a huge range of "how not to do it" as applied to toxic chemicals and industrial safety practices.

Of course, our beloved president is planning on "Making America Great Again", by eliminating the agency responsible for investigating these incidents and publishing this information:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-01/trump-said-to-again-propose-eliminating-chemical-safety-board

[T3sl4co1l]

I've binged a few of those videos... they're not quite a mystery as they unravel smoothly throughout the video, but you get that creeping sense of dread.

How about the rural gas station one?  You'll be screaming at your monitor, "run away!"

Remember, Every safety regulation is there because someone died to teach us that lesson.

Tim

[chickenHeadKnob]

You folks are forgetting the  country of Japan which has a proud legacy of nuc-cluster-phucks. On the way to creating godzilla and rodan we have of course Fukushima but also the lesser known:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accident which is the Japanese equivalent to Rocky Flats. Also there is the fast breeder sodium cooled Monju reactor which made a grand total of 1 hour worth of power before decommissioning.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monju_Nuclear_Power_Plant 

[Mr. Scram]

It'd be hard to do worse if you tried. I'm a bit baffled how this could continue this long. When you have a restaurant, you get regular health inspections. When you have a nuclear weapons facility, nobody seems to ever check in on what the hell you're doing there? Even a cursory or superficial inspection would have revealed the many issues. I don't think I can blame just the plant management when there apparently is no system of accountability in this sector at all. Not to mention another party took over the plant and saw no issue with how things were looking and being done.

[In Vacuo Veritas]

Who *chooses* to become a nuclear weapons designer? A psychopath?

[Cyberdragon]

Who *chooses* to become a nuclear weapons designer? A psychopath?

Smart people who have extreme polical beliefs and scream "nuke the bastards!", thus finding means to actually do just that. AKA the Evil Genious Also, on job applications, they often say the exact work is "classified" (though they leave clues).

[dmills]

Tokaimura was just facepalm worthy.
Yep, buckets (literally) of ~14% enriched Uranyl Nitrate, and over filling the settling tank to the point that it went prompt critical...

Not that some of Japans other Nuclear misadventures have been much better, but that one just takes the cake for 'was nobody involved in actually doing this thing thinking?'.

Still, some of the hairy arsed shit that goes in in petrochem, makes the nuclear game seem like amateur hour.
Alarms turned off, "Oh we always over fill the column to avoid problems if it runs dry", sensors that report zero if driven past full scale, and emergency vent stacks with **isolating** valves, that the management bonus was based on production not safety was in my view the root cause.

Fucking depressing.

Regards, Dan.

[N2IXK]

I've binged a few of those videos... they're not quite a mystery as they unravel smoothly throughout the video, but you get that creeping sense of dread.

How about the rural gas station one?  You'll be screaming at your monitor, "run away!"

I liked this one. It's even related to electronics, as they were manufacturing quartz crystals for oscillators and other applications:



As usual, plenty of warning signs before the accident, but money won out over public safety yet again.....

[coppercone2]

The employees also sometimes know how dangerous it is but you get a 'stiff' management style which basically implies your gonna get fired if you say anything. Most of the people involved in this kind of stuff usually like, won't even bring anything up if it costs above a certain dollar value.

possible indicators for this management style:
-stained/crappy/ugly floors
-poor paint jobs/rust/old cardboard
-the ceiling / duct work is dirty, stained walls, old grease

If you like the nuclear industry there are also videos that show the careful dismantling of such old structures on youtube.. you could tell the stuff was built cheap.. I mean they got robotically controlled saws on rail systems driving around to cut up the floor..

I am sure someone can make a comprehensive profile list to get an idea about a company like a criminal psychologist would, but its probobly not always that obvious

Here is a trick: run your hand on a exposed girder to see if they even bothered to debur it (usually razor sharp but covered with 10 layers of paint). This could tell you something about the construction of a building and the quality of work involved. Unfortunatly not so easy to know if the bolts happen to be constructed out of cast iron

maybe at least you can tell if the girder is over stressed if the hardened sharp blade on it begins to crack? design feature? 

[T3sl4co1l]

I liked this one. It's even related to electronics, as they were manufacturing quartz crystals for oscillators and other applications:

And not even far from my home town -- I've probably driven past the place on multiple occasions and never realized that's what they did there, or that that could/did happen!

Tim

[coppercone2]

the stuff about japan is very interesting, I thought it would be all angelical in japan 

[Kevman]

Such nuclear waste disposal wasn't isolated to there.

My parents live fairly closely to Apollo PA, former home of NUMEC, and my dad works with a lot of people who live there. My dad works with a woman who lives literally across the street from the former plant.

NUMEC disposed of their waste by digging 10 trenches with a bulldozer on site, pushing the... Whatever... in and covering it up. 

After years of locals campaigning due to very high cancer rates, it finally got Superfund status and the Army Corps of Engineers hired a contractor, around 2012. In 2014, the contractor just up and left. The next day, the army started patrolling the area with assault rifles. The woman could literally see people with rifles watching her kid play in her yard. No one knows what they found, of course, they're not saying.

Considering the company lost 600 pounds of highly enriched uranium in the 60s, well...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apollo_Affair

The wikipedia page hasn't been updated since before the original contractor pulled out- It originally was supposed to be done in 2015 and is now scheduled for 2019 until 2031 and cost over half a billion total. They've kept the area under guard this whole time.

All to cleanup a field in on the edge of a small town in the middle of nowhere.

Of course my dad's coworker's house is completely worthless, despite being pretty nice. No one wants to live across the street from a radioactive military zone. The government should just buy it from her.

[Nominal Animal]

Still beats the Soviets -- they dumped waste directly into a lake, not even a clay-lined dump or anything, just a natural one.  Among other horrors...

Nice distraction, exactly what I'd expect from an american.

Everybody knows the Soviets were gripped by an insane ideology, so there's nothing surprising in them doing incredibly idiotic things.

[coppercone2]

what

[alsetalokin4017]

For some reason all the embedded videos up above aren't showing up for me, I just get the funny "server error" message. Can the links be posted simply, without embedding?

[Mr. Scram]

For some reason all the embedded videos up above aren't showing up for me, I just get the funny "server error" message. Can the links be posted simply, without embedding?

YouTube seems to be broken, as embedded clips elsewhere are broken too. Patience will likely fix things.

[schmitt trigger]

YouTube went down for a while.
It is back up running now.

[T3sl4co1l]

Still beats the Soviets -- they dumped waste directly into a lake, not even a clay-lined dump or anything, just a natural one.  Among other horrors...

Nice distraction, exactly what I'd expect from an american.

Everybody knows the Soviets were gripped by an insane ideology, so there's nothing surprising in them doing incredibly idiotic things.

what

I couldn't've said it better myself...

It is possible to hold more than one thing in one's mind at a time; you should try it.

The US did a variety of nasty, messy things.  The amount of time and effort it's taken to clean up the Hanford site alone is mind boggling, let alone all the other locations.  And the probable military dumps that are still deeply secret (give or take if you want to believe questionable testimony like Bob Lazar).

But also as rushed and messy as we did things, the Soviets, seemingly always, managed to top that.  Which is just downright fucking scary, like accidental worldwide apocalypse scary.

Example, I'm not aware (offhand) of any incidents of continent-scale fallout due to the US, excepting atmospheric testing obviously.  But there were, uhh, three or more cases, I forget which exactly -- where this happened in Russia.  The lake being one example, Chernobyl being the most notorious example, and I think there was at least one more.

The difference for Russia is both historically and contemporaneously significant: a lower emphasis on the value of life, or of the individual.  That's fine when you're fighting or defending a war of attrition and you've got all of Mother Russia to throw at your enemy; it's rather less fine when you're playing with the atom and can permanently poison your entire country, or the whole world.

And not to leave out the bloody Brits, look at the goofy mess they made at Windscale -- enriched pyrophoric metals, wrapped in more reactive metals, left open to the air and made to heat up?  What were they thinking!?  They got exactly the outcome they should've expected!

Probably every country that has had a nuclear program, has their safety policy written in blue-glowing blood.  There are plenty of lessons to learn from those who have already made those mistakes, but alas, you know psychology.

Tim

[dmills]

And then we put the resulting fire (in a red hot **GRAPHITE** pile no less) out with WATER!
Directly forced air cooled, graphite moderated reactor with reactive metal fuel cladding, what could possibly go wrong?

Of course the 'follies' added to the top of the exhaust stacks turned out to be rather more important then some had expected.

Military crash programs tend to be like that, whatever country does them (See the 'accident' at SL-1 for a US case of feeding the fuckup fairy).

It is interesting to note that essentially all the civilian reactor designs are really minor respins on 1950's plutonium producers pretending to be power plants, the very short (~6 months), low burn up fuel cycle gives it away as that is how you optimise for weapons grade isotopically pure Pu.

Almost the only reactors that do NOT fit this model are the military ones where long refuel intervals and an ability to get online quickly even with a badly poisoned core argue for a rather different set of tradeoffs, including fun things like the fuel loading being large enough to allow a prompt criticality excursion during startup if the fuel is reasonably fresh and there are few neutron poisons present, this is why the military reactor operators get so much training. No sane civilian reactor design has enough excess gain to allow a prompt criticality during startup, you NEVER want to do that.

Regards, Dan.

[MT]

Sugar factory explosion.

[T3sl4co1l]

It is interesting to note that essentially all the civilian reactor designs are really minor respins on 1950's plutonium producers pretending to be power plants, the very short (~6 months), low burn up fuel cycle gives it away as that is how you optimise for weapons grade isotopically pure Pu.

I suspect that the only reason nuke plants were installed in the first place, was as a means of maintaining the military nuclear infrastructure -- manufacture and production, and the knowledge base of actively experienced workers and engineers.

As soon as the Cold War started to wind down, so did the construction of new nuke plants.  Now that there is much less strategic emphasis on nukes (they've pretty well matured in their role, and the quantity continues to decline as far as I know), there's less need for experienced workers, and plants are even closing.

As for actual mechanisms, I don't have any explanation, no.  Correlation is great, but it doesn't mean anything in and of itself!  Military-industrial complex?  Look for changes in the regulatory atmosphere over time, and who's responsible for those changes?  Possible.  Just a suspicion.

The colloquial explanation is public pressure and poor economics.

That's not terribly satisfying to me, because public opinion can be swayed (the educated generally approve of nuclear power).  For the budget on these stupid things ($B's), they could handily win a freaking election* if they budgeted a modest fraction of that to education, advertising and campaigning.  Do they just not have their heart in it?  A mere million dollars is serious getting-people-involved money, and we're talking thousands of millions.  These things can't happen without a lot of people getting involved.  Wouldn't they protect their investment by involving some advertising people?  (Maybe they do, but keep it mostly local, where it matters most?  Idunno.)

*The budget of the RNC and DNC is around $1B each, at least in presidential election cycles.

As for economics, that's largely driven by the astronomically staggering amount of paperwork needed for the whole thing, top down, bottom up, every component, every weldor, accounted for, accredited and licensed.  Such a massive design inevitably contains mistakes and omissions, and there is no process to handle that.  When mistakes are found, it just snowballs out of control.  Take the Vogtle reactors for example: stuck in contractor disputes for apparently additional billions worth of costs and legal fees, if I've understood it correctly.

Conventional power plants aren't much less dangerous, and are built on a regular basis, without nearly as much quibbling, and much leaner budgets.  Simply enough: to build nukes, apply the same regulations to them, adding only what is needed to control and protect the nuclear part of the system.  They'll pop up overnight.

Maybe the designers, builders, and perhaps owners too, of conventional power plants, are the ones lobbying for restrictive nukes?  No idea.  Someone, something, somewhere, definitely has it against them, that much is clear.

Tim

[duak]

I understand that the Tokamura criticality accident was due to one employee trying to improve efficiency by working with larger batches.  Unfortunately, he didn't understand why this was a bad idea.  A larger batch has more fissile material to be concentrated and can reach criticality.  And it did.

I understand that one problem with radioactive waste storage is that the radioactive nuclides transmute into other elements.  These can be gaseous but inert like helium which takes up more space and builds up pressure.  They can be reactive like halogens (eg. fluorine and chlorine) that will corrode steel drums.  There was an incident recently where organic kitty litter was substituted for the approved stuff to act as an absorber.  see WIPP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant

An interesting read about a weapons designer is "The Curve of Binding Energy" by John McPhee about Ted Taylor.  He worked on many of the early fission devices at Los Alamos and then went to General Atomics.

Ray Haroldsen has a closer view of the wild west can-do attitudes in the mid-50's at the Idaho labs: https://www.ne.anl.gov/pdfs/reactors/Story-of-BORAX-Reactor-by-Ray-Haroldsen-v2.pdf  Good thing it wasn't too big.

"Proving the Principle" about the Idaho lab experiments is a sanitized version of what they did there.

Canada had its own incidents at Chalk River, upstream from the Capitol Ottawa.

How do you enforce the maxim "Learn from the mistakes of others, you won't live long enough to make them all yourself"?

Cheers,

[Mr. Scram]

I understand that the Tokamura criticality accident was due to one employee trying to improve efficiency by working with larger batches.  Unfortunately, he didn't understand why this was a bad idea.  A larger batch has more fissile material to be concentrated and can reach criticality.  And it did.

I understand that one problem with radioactive waste storage is that the radioactive nuclides transmute into other elements.  These can be gaseous but inert like helium which takes up more space and builds up pressure.  They can be reactive like halogens (eg. fluorine and chlorine) that will corrode steel drums.  There was an incident recently where organic kitty litter was substituted for the appoved stuff to act as an absorber.  see WIPP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant

An interesting read about a weapons designer is "The Curve of Binding Energy" by John McPhee about Ted Taylor.  He worked on many of the early fission devices at Los Alamos and then went to General Atomics.

Ray Haroldsen has a closer view of the wild west can-do attitudes in the mid-50's at hte Idaho labs: https://www.ne.anl.gov/pdfs/reactors/Story-of-BORAX-Reactor-by-Ray-Haroldsen-v2.pdf  Good thing it wasn't too big.

"Proving the Principle" about the Idaho lab experients is a sanitized version of what they did there.

Canada had its own incidents at Chalk River, upstream from the Capitol Ottawa.

How do you enforce the maxim "Learn from the mistakes of others, you won't live long enough to make them all yourself"?

Cheers,

I see many problems in my day to day life and job caused by good intending people who don't have a clue what they're doing. They carefully find ways around the precautions taken which often seem of little consequence. They don't realise there was a good reason for that precaution and that a price has been paid to learn that lesson.

[babysitter]

Maybe its not easy to get a good non-german report (this one at least has pics)

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/07/photogalleries/100708-radioactive-nuclear-waste-science-salt-mine-dump-pictures-asse-ii-germany/

Other nations (like ours) also do fuck up nuclear operational safety very well.

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

In 1966 a USAF bomber dropped four thermonuclear bombs on the south coast of Spain. One went to the bottom of the sea, the other three on the beach. None exploded obviously or you would have known already, but two of them cracked open on impact and contaminated the area.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash

The 1966 Palomares B-52 crash, or the Palomares incident, occurred on 17 January 1966, when a B-52G bomber of the United States Air Force's Strategic Air Command collided with a KC-135 tanker during mid-air refueling at 31,000 feet (9,450 m) over the Mediterranean Sea, off the coast of Spain. The KC-135 was completely destroyed when its fuel load ignited, killing all four crew members. The B-52G broke apart, killing three of the seven crew members aboard.[1]

Of the four Mk28-type hydrogen bombs the B-52G carried,[2] three were found on land near the small fishing village of Palomares in the municipality of Cuevas del Almanzora, Almería, Spain. The non-nuclear explosives in two of the weapons detonated upon impact with the ground, resulting in the contamination of a 2-square-kilometer (490-acre) (0.78 square mile) area by plutonium. The fourth, which fell into the Mediterranean Sea, was recovered intact after a ​2 1⁄2-month-long search

[Nominal Animal]

It is possible to hold more than one thing in one's mind at a time; you should try it.

Nah, I just didn't like the way you seemed to defend a horribly bad corporate practice by diverting attention to something even worse that a known murderous ideology did, with millions of innocents killed in Soviet Union alone, for ideological reasons.  (I saw it like defending kicking a baby by pointing a finger to others stabbing people.) In my defense, the typo in the first word of the subject of this thread already, uh, triggered me.  I don't like socialists or slippery people, and overreacted. Apologies.

Probably every country that has had a nuclear program, has their safety policy written in blue-glowing blood.

Nah; people and blood is cheap.  It's the money that dictates the rules.  And that's also why corporations can get away with horrible practices.

For example, did you know that when ingested, uranium is about twice as lethal chemically than due to its radioactivity?  Using depleted uranium (²³⁸U without any radioactive isotopes like ²³⁵U) in projectiles (which vaporize on impact, generating lots of tiny particles that end up in living beings), or letting it leech into groundwater, is just as deadly as doing that with radioactive uranium?  It's just that the effects (heavy metal poisoning; even worse than lead or mercury poisoning) takes much longer to appear.  Whether its spent fuel or pure ²³⁵U, it'll kill people and animals if ingested due to its heavy metal toxicity way before the effects of its radiation does.  Radiation isn't nearly as big a problem people think it is.

All that is extremely well documented.  Internationally, we've managed to ban expanding bullets, but not depleted uranium.  It's like banning knives, unless they're dipped in curare.

When countries are unable to apply even common sense, how could they force/require corporations to?  Even if rules are set, if bad practices are found out years later, the people who made the profits are long gone and well isolated from any repercussions.  Even Finland, with its ostensibly careful approach, will use a pretty questionable method for the long-term storage.