April 25th, 2014, 20:57 GMT · By
Laura Sinpetru
Report: Radioactive Leak at Nuclear Waste Site in the US Was Avoidable
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Report says leak at Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico could have been avoided
Earlier
this year, on February 16, the Department of Energy in the United
States announced that excessive levels of radiation had been documented
at a nuclear waste site in New Mexico. The site in question is known as
the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, and it presently accommodates for
transuranic waste.
Recent news on the topic says that,
according to a report shared with the public by the Department of Energy
this past Thursday, this incident at said nuclear waste site in New
Mexico could have been avoided.
As previously reported, traces of
radiation were picked up by underground sensors at the Waste Isolation
Pilot Plant on Friday, February 14. This increase in radiation levels
most likely occurred as a result of a leak inside one of the facility's
waste-storage vaults.
Despite the fact that these waste-storage
vaults sit at a depth of about 2,000 feet (nearly 610 meters), some
radioactive contamination somehow worked its way above ground. There is
evidence to indicate that this happened due to the fact that the
emergency filtration system failed to contain it.
NPR
informs that, in its report, the Department of Energy argues that the
waste storage vault leaked partly due to improper maintenance, poor
management, and unsuitable training and oversight.
Read More Here
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Management, Safety Cited for Radiation Release
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. April 24, 2014 (AP)
By JERI CLAUSING Associated Press
A
radiation release from the federal government's underground nuclear
waste dump in southeastern New Mexico was the result of a slow erosion
of the safety culture at the 15-year-old site, which was evident in the
bungled response to the emergency, federal investigators said in a
report released Thursday.
The report from the U.S. Department of
Energy's Accident Investigation Board cited poor management, ineffective
maintenance and a lack of proper training and oversight at the Waste
Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad. The report also found that much of
the operation failed to meet standards for a nuclear facility.
The
series of shortcomings are similar to those found in a probe of the
truck fire in the half-mile-deep mine just nine days before the Feb. 14
radiation release that shuttered the plant indefinitely.
Given the
latest findings, watchdog Don Hancock said the leak that contaminated
21 workers with low doses of radiation in mid-February was a "best-case
scenario."
"Everything conspired for the least bad event to occur,
based on what we know — and there is a still a lot we don't know," he
said.
Last month, the head of the Defense Nuclear Safety Board,
which has staff monitoring the Waste Isolation Pilot Project, called the
accidents "near misses."
Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board
Chairman Peter Winokur said that for six days after the fire, no
underground air monitors were operational, meaning that if that system
had failed when the leak occurred Feb. 14, "or if the release event had
occurred three days earlier, the release of radioactive material from
the aboveground mine exhaust would have been orders of magnitude
larger."
DOE Accident Investigation Board Chairman Ted Wyka
previewed the findings of the latest report at a community meeting
Wednesday night, identifying the root cause as a "degradation of key
safety management and safety culture."
Read More here
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Crews locate area of radiation leak at New Mexico nuclear waste site
Published time: April 18, 2014 19:25
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), New Mexico. (Image from wikipedia.org user@Leaflet)
While
the cause of a radiation leak at the United States’ first nuclear waste
repository remains unknown, officials have reportedly pinpointed the
facility’s contaminated area.
According to the Associated Press,
the Department of Energy’s Tammy Reynolds told residents in Carlsbad,
New Mexico, that no definitive conclusions can be made regarding the
latest discovery, but that further investigation into the area should
produce some information next week.
The Waste Isolation Pilot
Plant (WIPP) has been shut down since February 14, when increased
radiation levels were detected inside and outside the plant.
On
Wednesday, crews investigating the leak made their way into the WIPP and
inspected the facility’s various panels, or the large underground salt
beds where nuclear waste is stored. These panels are located about a
half-mile below the Earth’s surface, and after five hours of inspection
they found that Panel 7 was the source of the leaked contamination.
Read More Here
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Search crew finds location but not source of leak at New Mexico nuclear waste storage site
By D. Lencho
21 April 2014
On
April 16, more than two months after an underground air monitor
detected airborne radiation underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot
Plant (WIPP) nuclear waste burial site in Carlsbad, New Mexico (see
“Thirteen workers exposed to radiation in New Mexico nuclear waste site” ), a search team clad in heavy protective gear discovered the location of the contamination.
Since
moving in the heavy-duty suits is slow and laborious, and the team’s
respiratory equipment was running low, the team turned back before
pinpointing the exact source of the leak, determining only that it is in
a storage unit known as panel seven. This means that more trips to the
2,150-feet-deep panel will be required to find the source and to deal
with it.
On the night of February 14, the monitor set off an
alert, causing evacuation of the area and a halt to deliveries. Since
then, the number of WIPP workers found to be contaminated with radiation
has risen from 13 to 21. In addition, increased radiation has been
detected in surrounding areas above ground.
The leak followed on
the heels of an incident on February 5 in which a salt-hauling truck
caught fire underground. 86 workers had to be evacuated. Six were
hospitalized for smoke inhalation and seven others were treated on site.
A
March 14 DOE (Department of Energy) Office of Environment Management
report on the fire “identifies shortcomings in the preventive
maintenance program, emergency management, and emergency response
training and drills by the Nuclear Waste Partnership LLC managing and
operating DOE Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M.,
and it also faults the oversight provided by DOE’s Carlsbad Field
Office,” according to an ohsonline.com article.
The article adds
that the report “finds the NWP/Carlsbad Field Office emergency
management program is not fully compliant with DOE’s requirements for a
comprehensive emergency management system. While the report identified
the direct cause of the incident…the investigative board identified 21
error precursors on the date of the fire. The truck operator’s training
and qualification were inadequate to ensure proper response to a vehicle
fire, and he did not initially notify the Central Monitoring Room that
there was a fire or describe the fire’s location.”
Joe Franco,
DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office manager, claimed, “We take these findings
seriously and, in fact, we are already implementing many of the
corrective actions in the report.”
However, criticism of WIPP from
outside the DOE—from scientific, community and environmental
organizations—has been constant since planning for the project began
decades ago.
WIPP’s history traces its roots to the emergence of
the US as a nuclear power during and after World War II. As the
development of nuclear weapons picked up its pace, the problem of the
accumulation of so-called transuranic waste, or TRU, developed along
with it. TRU contains the elements americium and plutonium—which has a
half-life in the tens of thousands of years—and contact with or
ingestion of it, although it is categorized as “low-level,” is
carcinogenic in minute amounts.
The Department of Energy began a
search for a location to dispose of TRU, and after other proposed sites
were rejected, decided in the early 1970s to begin testing on an area
known as the Delaware Basin in southeastern New Mexico, about 26 miles
east of the town of Carlsbad. A salt basin formed about 250 million
years ago, and below some 300 meters (1,000 feet) of soil and rock, it
was promoted by government officials and some scientists as an ideal
waste disposal spot.
Read More Here
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