Subsurface Transport of Plutonium in Organic and Aqueous Acidic Processing Wastes at the Hanford Site, USA
The paper to which I'll refer in this post is this one: Subsurface Transport of Plutonium in Organic and Aqueous Acidic Processing Wastes at the Hanford Site, USA Teresa Baumer, Mavrik Zavarin, Carolyn I. Pearce, Hilary P. Emerson, and Annie B. Kersting Environmental Science & Technology 2024 58 (20), 8909-8918
I'm sure there are many people, my opinion of whom I must restrain from stating here, who will find the title of this scientific paper if not terrifying, at least scary. By contrast, it's not particularly scary to me; I have long contended that fear of plutonium has killed vastly more people than exposure to plutonium itself ever has or almost certainly ever will, even in the unlikely case that the general public, worldwide, chooses to wisely embrace the value of plutonium and attempts to save what is left to save by vastly scaling up the production of plutonium. I contend that doing so is the last best hope of humanity.
The paper is open sourced. It is technical in nature, but anyone can read it by clicking on the link above, although understanding what it says requires a modicum of technical knowledge, some of which may be abstruse but is accessible with a little education.
The overwhelming number of people who have died from the use of plutonium died almost 80 years ago with the detonation of a nuclear weapon over the city of Nagasaki. The death toll from this half of the only nuclear war ever observed, the nuclear attack on Nagasaki, will never be known with precision; most working figures place the death toll at less than 100,000 people, although I regard 100,000 to be a reasonable worst case working figure. In my long tenure at DU I have often referred to the death toll, as reported in a widely read and widely respected paper in the prestigious medical journal Lancet, is about 19,000 people a day, plus or minus 1000 human beings. If these estimates are correct, since the fission of plutonium in industrial settings prevents air pollution, fear of plutonium results in a Nagasaki scale death toll every six or seven days, continuously, without interruption, year after year, decade after decade. The death toll has not stopped, and will not stop, without the demystifying of plutonium.
Numbers don't lie. People lie, to themselves and to each other, but numbers don't lie.
Undoubtedly there have been other plutonium related deaths since 1945, but to the extent these exist at all, the numbers are vanishingly small on any scale that matters.
Global warming - I have been advised by a public figure I highly respect to stop using the "but her emails" and "too old Joe" media's euphemism "climate change" - is adding vastly more people to this death toll than the Lancet figures for chemical air pollution suggest. It has left the planet in flames and is now causing direct deaths from exposure to extreme heat, and indirect deaths from other forms of extreme weather. The death toll will only rise ever faster, particularly as industrial and private agriculture is impacted and as ever more ecosystems are destroyed.
By the way, to briefly return to the war resulting in the attack on Nagasaki, the only nuclear war ever observed, like nearly uncountable wars since, started as a petroleum war, both for access to petroleum - the attack on Pearl Harbor was designed to neutralize the US Navy appearing on the flanks of the Japanese drive to conquer the oil fields of Borneo and Java in what is now modern day Indonesia - and in the use of petroleum used as weapons of mass destruction.
These are facts. Facts matter.
Selective attention to facts is a very dangerous enterprise, only slightly less pernicious than claiming the existence, as an ultimate oxymoron, "alternate facts."
Now let's turn to the paper cited at the outset. I have previously referred to papers by some of the authors in this space in another long (and very technical) post in this space: 828 Underground Nuclear Tests, Plutonium Migration in Nevada, Dunning, Kruger, Strawmen, and Tunnels. I wrote that post in response to a appalling example of selective attention that it was my misfortune to come across. The happy result of confronting this appalling selective attention was to familiarize myself with the work of Dr. Annie B. Kersting, an expert on the geochemistry of the actinides, plutonium in particular.
I will excerpt the opening of the paper even though, as noted previously, it is open sourced:
The authors do not tell us much about how and when these trenches operated to dispose of nuclear weapons waste. By appeal to another document PNNL-SA-58953, A Review of Subsurface Behavior of Plutonium and Americium at the 200-PW-1/3/6 Operable Units, it seems the trenches were constructed in 1947. In over 70 years, it appears that plutonium migrated about 37 meters; something found to be quite surprising given the geochemistry of plutonium. (Why the plutonium migrated this far in this case will be referenced below.)
By the way, I question the wisdom of spending $235 billion dollars to "clean up" Hanford, since I doubt that it will result in the saving of very many, if any, lives.
For the first time in several decades, the world's largest user of nuclear energy to save lives, the United States, completed two new nuclear reactors, the famous Vogtle reactors in Georgia. These reactors are now operable, and again, saving human lives. Even though the United States historically built more than 100 commercial nuclear reactors while providing some of the lowest cost electricity in the world, a great deal of electronic ink has been spent whining about the cost of these reactors, which came in about 25 billion dollars plus or minus a few billion. The argument made by people engaged in highly selective attention is that nuclear energy is "too expensive" and climate change and air pollution are thus not "too expensive." This calculus is obscene in the extreme. The cost of these two reactors was not symmetrically distributed; the second cost about 30% less than the first. Thus, if the total cost was 25 billion dollars for two reactors, the first cost a little under 15 billion; the second a little over 10 billion. This is because of what is know as FOAKE costs, "first of a kind engineering." Money was saved on the second reactor by embracing the things learned with the first. The nuclear manufacturing industry in the United States, which once built more than 100 reactors, was deliberately destroyed by fear and ignorance toward the end of the 20th century; this fear and ignorance that killed people. The rebuilding of this deliberately destroyed intellectual and engineering infrastructure added cost and led to delays.
Suppose we ignored the pestilential posturing of antinukes and continued with the restoration of nuclear manufacturing infrastructure, which, by the way, the Biden administration, which advertises itself, correctly I think, as pushing for the "largest sustained push to accelerate civil nuclear deployment in the United States in nearly five decades," endorses.
White House holds summit on US nuclear energy deployment
(This is just one of the manifold reasons I have extreme support for the reelection of Joe Biden; he's an old man who can think and do so clearly without bias or preconceived notions.)
At 10 billion dollars a pop - undoubtedly costs would drop further if we spent $235 billion dollars on the effort - we might built 24 equivalents of the second Vogtle reactor, probably many more than that.
The number of lives lost from radiation exposure from the Hanford mess over its 80 year history is so small, if, indeed, any lives have been so lost, as to fail to justify billions of dollars to prevent future such losses. We might save hundreds of millions of lives by choosing, instead, to spend the equivalent money to "clean up" Hanford, this to a standard we apply to nothing else, for the distribution of free malaria vaccines.
Richland, Washington, outside of Hanford, is a safe city in which to live, some of the residents do the great science that is done at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory adjacent to Hanford. The other post I put together on Hanford, linked herein, appeals to a sober evaluation of the risk of doing little or nothing to ameliorate the situation at Hanford by appeal, to among other things, the data from the famous natural nuclear reactors that operated at Oklo billions of years ago. Perhaps we can get by, very safely, by reorganization of priorities: Which is more important, which will save more lives, cleaning the atmosphere or "cleaning up" Hanford, to repeat, to a standard of risk that we apply to nothing else, certainly not to fossil fuels, which we happily burn no matter how much death and destruction they routinely cause?
It is clear to me that spending $250 billion dollars on new reactors that will serve humanity for the next 80 years, if not longer, would be a wiser and more productive use of resources.
The authors conclude that the reason that the plutonium at the trenches surprising was that the plutonium waste was dumped along with the highly acidic chemical waste connected with its extraction.
One can read the author's conclusions along these lines:
I believe we should do some things at Hanford to at least monitor and perhaps in rare cases stabilize the waste materials, but I question whether the standards of "safety" are rational in a world burning because of dangerous fossil fuel waste, waste that actually kills people, and does so in vast numbers, are even remotely reasonable. It seems clear to me that they are not.
We know incredibly more about plutonium chemistry than we did in 1947, or even 2000, and as I have argued, all or almost all of the components of used nuclear fuel are valuable. I have convinced myself, if no one else, there is no need for trenches, tanks, or waste dumps and the view to contrary is the result of pernicious marketing, selective attention, and a good deal of outright venality, the success of which I attribute to the propaganda fostered by the fossil fuel industry.
On this note, I wish to refer - to show the direct link, often involving the very same corrupted scientists - between tobacco marketing in the denial of health risk of smoking and fossil fuel marketing in the denial of climate science.
The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial
This book does not explicitly refer to it, but clearly from the above, I extend to fossil fuel marketing the demonization of nuclear energy, nuclear energy being the last best hope of the human race in my view, seeing said demonization as nothing more than fossil fuel marketing, which has successfully sold, and continues to sell fossil fuels by appeal to worthless and expensive (especially because they don't work) schemes and attention diverting "fixes" like the reactionary and destructive claims related to so called "renewable energy," and slicker appeals to stuff like hydrogen, sequestration, blah, blah, blah.
E.g.: A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels.
As a result, things are getting worse faster: 2024's Disastrous CO2 Increased Readings Continue at the Mauna Loa Observatory.
We are doing nothing effective to address global warming other than rethinking nuclear energy, and even that, sorrily, is probably too little too late.
History will not forgive us, nor should it.
Have a nice weekend.
= new reply since forum marked as read
