Health Physics

We’re at the tail end of National Radiation Protection Professionals Week. These professionals are known as health physicists (an intentionally confusing name, according to bloggers at the EPA), and they make all the nifty radiochemistry, nuclear reactors, and safe cleanup of rad materials possible. Thanks HP’s!

Talk About Nuclear Energy

Earlier this week I attended a Sierra Club house party where we saw a preview of a documentary about mountain top removal for mining coal. Towards the end, the movie talked about alternatives to coal – reducing our energy usage and using wind, solar, and geothermal energy. Conspicuously absent from the presentation was nuclear energy. I found this shocking. Yes, nuclear energy has its problems (note the topic of this blog), but to not mention it as a possibility at all struck me as bizarre and perhaps even a little dishonest.
In 2007, 19.4% of U.S. energy came from nuclear reactors . That’s almost 1/5. If you want to talk seriously about alternatives to coal (which contributed a whopping 48.5% of the U.S. energy in 2007), the nuclear option should at least be mentioned. I don’t consider myself to be either a major supporter or opponent of nuclear energy. What I do strongly advocate is that it be part of the conversation.

Along these lines, there is an initiative in England called KNOO – Keeping the Nuclear Option Open. One of their four work packages is entirely dedicated to the issue of nuclear waste.

Disposal sites run by American Ecology

Here’s another company specializing in radioactive waste: American Ecology. They have four disposal facilities – Beatty, NV; Grand View, ID; Robstown, TX; and Richland, WA. The NV location is right near Yucca Mountain but doesn’t appear to actually do much with radioactive waste, unless that includes PCB “mixed waste”. The Richland, WA site is listed by the NRC as one of the country’s three low-level waste disposal facilities, and the Idaho and Texas locations only accept naturally occurring radioactive material (NORM) and “NRC-exempt waste”. I’m curious to know how many facilities there are accepting NORM, their geology, and methods. According to a webpage associated with Argonne national lab, “The majority of U.S. NORM waste is going to the commercial injection facility charging $150/bbl [/barrel].”

R.W.M.A. and NORM in Louisiana

Today I had the pleasure of meeting with the staff of Radioactive Waste Management Associates in their office tucked in among the art galleries of Chelsea. Most of the projects they take on are related to transport issues and exposure analysis, and their relationship with industry is often adversarial. They portrayed themselves as fighting for workers who are treated as expendable by their employers.

One of the projects they mentioned doing work on involved radium in some Louisiana oil pipes maintained by Exxon. I’m guessing their work was related to this case described by Bloomberg (pdf). This piqued my interest because I rarely think about radium, and I had not realized just how much of a problem NORM can be for extraction industries. NORM here stands for Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials, although context is everything with acronyms.What are the U-bearing minerals that are so common in the subsurface that drilling so often brings up and concentrates U and its decay products radium and radon?

Putting the Los Alamos garbage “elsewhere”

New York Times (NYT) has an article about cleanup operations at Los Alamos, where waste is being “dug up and trucked elsewhere.” Best I can tell, “elsewhere” means dry storage and WIPP. For more detail, they also link to this report to Congress from the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) Office of Environmental Management (EM). Aside from the report authors’ decision to use the word “disposition” as a verb, it’s a charming document – nice figures, important bits highlighted, useful executive summary. The NYT also cites the report’s upper estimate for the total cleanup cost as $260 billion, less than the $300 billion I had thought.

The article also includes a link to a DoE flyer about jobs created and saved by the Recovery Act. The good news for nuclear wastenistas is that if you live near one of these 18 locations (I’m 2.5 hours away from the nearest one – boooo) there are jobs. The not so good news is that they have 10,800 new or saved jobs and 73,000 job applicants. So about 14.8% of the people who applied for a job with the nuclear waste cleanup crew got/kept one.

Just for fun, let’s compare that number to college acceptance rates. Applying for and getting one of these nuclear waste cleanup jobs is very roughly equivalent to getting into Amherst, the 18th most selective college in the country. If the hiring/acceptance decisions are completely random, you have a better chance of getting into CalTech or Cornell than of getting one of these jobs.