Jeri Clausing of The Associate Press reports Kitty Litter The Cause Of Radiation Leak.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Los Alamos National Laboratory packed 57 barrels of nuclear waste with a type of kitty litter believed to have caused a radiation leak at the federal government's troubled nuclear waste dump, posing a potentially "imminent" and "substantial" threat to public health and the environment, New Mexico officials said Monday.
State Environment Department Secretary Ryan Flynn issued a formal order giving the lab two days to submit a plan for securing the waste containers, many of which are likely stored outdoors on the lab's northern New Mexico campus or at temporary site in west Texas.
The order says 57 barrels of waste were packed with nitrate salts and organic kitty litter, a combination thought to have caused a heat reaction and radiation release that contaminated 22 workers with low levels of radiation at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad in February.
To clarify the kitty litter itself was not radioactive, apparently thousands of barrels of radioactive nitrate salts were pulled out of an old nuclear bomb dump used for decades and mixed with kitty litter as a means of long-term disposal. Kitty litter turns out to be great for absorbing any liquid that leaks out of drums before they are sealed. The plant recently switched from non-organic to organic litter so officials are investigating whether this could be the cause of the leak.
I find the use of kitty litter some what amusing. I taught a course in computer simulation for long-term strategic planning at the Idaho National Labs several decades ago to the teams planning for the permanent storage nuclear waste and they talked about all sort of exotic possibilities such as mixing nuclear waste down into small pellet and then embedding it in glass-like ceramic compounds, surrounded by salt, separated with graphite planes to absorb neutrons, or some kind of bothersome radiation that one would want riling up neighboring racks.
So now we are mixing waste with kitty litter, throwing it into barrels, and down into mine shafts. Admittedly, though, most of folks I taught were working with high level nuclear waste.
Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Truck
57 barrels were on their way to the only permanent repository for low-level nuclear waste called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
A fire in a truck hauling salt from the mine nine days before the radiation leak in Febraury is thought to have been unrelated but initial investigations blamed both of them on "slow erosion of the safety culture at the 15-year-old, multibillion-dollar site."
Nevertheless, this new WIPP plant is probably an improvement over whatever dumps these wastes were thrown in many decades ago, some probably going all the way back to after WWII for low-level wastes.
No permanent repository for nuclear wastes has been approved of yet.
Given that we have substantial amounts of nuclear wastes being stored ad-hoc on-site at nuclear generation sites, as well as nuclear weapons waste going back to the first atomic bomb tests, some at some at risk for flooding in the next 100 years due to accelerated sea-level rise, we need to identify a location for a permanent repository. I have an article in my que I am working on for sometime in the week or two on this topic.
