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RE: It's not about dose ...
A few testy comments on Bill's "points".
1. The Rasmussen report (1973-74) did in fact say that what happened at TMI
(1979) could happen.
2. Industry folklore is that the Soviets did say their reactors were so
safe they didn't need containment. They did lose a lot of credibility and
eventually their empire, partly because of that loss of credibility. Do you
have any sense for the differences between the pre-Chernobyl Soviet nuclear
program and programs in the rest of the world?
3. For decades, Hanford dumped massive amounts (approximately 450 billion
gallons) of lightly contaminated waste liquids directly into "cribs" (i.e.,
directly in the ground). It percolated roughly 400 feet down through the
sand to the water table and then started moving toward the Columbia River,
where the original lightly contaminated waste, first diluted by the
groundwater flow was them massively diluted by the flow of the Columbia
River (average 60,000 to 100,000 cubic feet per second under low flow
conditions; on the order of 250,000 to 380,000 cfs during spring runoff).
Groundwater flow into the Columbia from the Hanford site is less than 40
cfs, so you are looking at dilutions by a factor of 2000 to 10000 of the
contaminated groundwater entering the river. River monitoring consistently
shows concentrations of some radionuclides higher in the water upstream of
the Hanford site than downstream. The only radionuclides with significantly
higher concentrations downstream are I-129 and H-3, with concentrations
respectively 10000 times and 200 times lower than EPA drinking water
standards. I live in Richland and drink water drawn from the river
downstream from the Hanford site. I have much better things to worry about.
There was significant contamination of the river with P-32 during the first
decade or so of operation of the site; that was one of the two radioisotopes
considered during the Hanford Dose Reconstruction Project (the other dose
reconstruction, I-131, was the basis for the recently completed Hanford
Thyroid Disease Study, which found no Hanford-related increase in thyroid
diseases among those who were children during the years of greatest releases
of radioiodine).
The more recent leakage of high level waste fluids for the Hanford waste
tanks is less than a million gallons, is moving slowly toward groundwater
with some of the waste binding to soil, and will be diluted when it is
metered into the groundwater flow and massively diluted when the groundwater
reaches the Columbia.
Much of the information above can be found in a white paper by Ronald Smith
of PNNL, written for the Columbia River Pastoral Letter Project and
available at <www.columbiariver.org/main_pages/readings/hanf/smith.htm>.
4. No particular comment on the Davis-Besse stuff, other than that it was
really ugly and I hope the appropriate people get appropriately strung up.
"It's not about dose, it's about trust" and I can see no reason to trust
Bill Lipton's kneejerk reactions to every issue.
Best regards.
Jim Dukelow
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Richland, WA
jim.dukelow@pnl.gov
These comments are mine and have not been reviewed and/or approved by my
management or by the U.S. Department of Energy.
-----Original Message-----
From: William V Lipton [mailto:liptonw@DTEENERGY.COM]
Sent: Wednesday, August 21, 2002 11:08 AM
To: Gary Isenhower
Cc: sandyfl@EARTHLINK.NET; radsafe@list.vanderbilt.edu;
powernet@hps1.org
Subject: Re: Security at U.S. Nuclear Labs Called Unacceptable
I agree with your first two points, although, after reading some of the
Radsafe
postings, I would hesitate to deny that some hp's are "aliens masquerading
as
scientists..."
Unfortunately, you overlook a few things:
1. TMI - What we'd been saying couldn't happen, did. Although the actual
release was
negligable, our confused and contradictory response reenforced public fears.
The
incident, itself, was more an emergency planning failure than a hardware
failure. That
it happened at all is largely because the industry ignored precursor events
- A FAILURE
OF CRITICAL SELF-EVALUATION.
2. The Soviets used to say that their plants are so well designed, they
don't need
containments. What couldn't happen, did. OOOP's; a slight loss of
credibility.
3. Hanford - Unfortunately, spent fuel waste IS transporting across the
barren desert
and is approaching the Columbia River, from which it's likely to get into
someone's
hair spray. In the meantime we spend $$$$ trying to clean up this mess and
don't seem
to be making much progress.
4. Davis Besse - FENCO tried to save a few bucks and put the whole
industry at risk.
There were all sorts of indications of a serious problem for anyone who
wanted to look
(eg., air sample filters rapidly becoming clogged, a layer of oxide on the
vessel
head); but no one wanted to look . We were down to our last safety barrier
and then
some. How can we assure the public that this is an aberration, not
"business as
usual"?
5....
The Radsafe response SHOULD be: What went wrong? What's the root cause?
What's the
most appropriate corrective action?
Instead, the usual response on Radsafe seems to be:
1. It's a media conspiracy.
2. A little radiation is probably good for you. (The only reason people
think it's
bad for you is a media conspiracy.)
3. [Fill in the blank] kills more people.
4. All of the above.
I'm beginning to think that we should change our name from "Radsafe" to
"Kneejerk."
We blame everyone and everything but ourselves.
The opinions expressed are strictly mine.
It's not about dose, it's about trust.
Curies forever.
Bill Lipton
liptonw@dteenergy.com
Gary Isenhower wrote:
> William V Lipton wrote:
> >
> > They are successful because the seem to take away our capacity for
critical
> > self-evaluation. We seem to have a circle the wagons, shoot the
messenger
> > attitude. We thus too often fail to find and correct our own problems
before our
> > critics find them for us.
>
> Respectfully, I think this is wrong and exactly the opposite of what
> usually happens. As radiation professionals, our capacity for critical
> self-evaluation is so hyperdeveloped that we faithfully stop doing
> usefull work and spend millions or billions in testing to show some
> wacko group that:
> no, spent fuel isn't teleporting across miles of barren desset and
> appearing in your hairspray, and
> no, those isotopes aren't evaporating thru the casket and we
aren't
> parking the trucks in your residential neighborhood, and
> no, none of the health physicists are aliens masqarading as
scientists
> in order to distribute deadly doses of 5 rad or so, thereby wiping out
> humanity and leaving the earth ripe for colonization (actually, this has
> not been conclusively studied - more funds are needed)
>
> In fact, we are the best friend Chicken Little ever had. We don't go
> dashing off in fear, but we do break out our best Falling-Sky
> particulate detectors to prove that the blue stuff isn't coming down
> anytime soon. Even so, 9 times out of 10 poor Chicken Little just
> doesn't believe us.
> _______________________________________________
>
> Gary Isenhower
> 713-798-8353
> garyi@bcm.tmc.edu
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