Nuclear waste scandal in germany

[His Divine Shadow]

Fucking fuckers, thanks for giving ammo to the antis. I hope this is overblown in scope and effects, AFAIK nuclear waste leaking into the ground water should not contaminate it as it sinks to the bottom due to being heavy elements and so forth.

Germany May Sue Atomic Waste Site Operators Over Negligence

By Brian Parkin

Sept. 2 (Bloomberg) -- Germany may sue the operators of an experimental atomic waste site for negligence after a report showed that safety regulations were flouted for decades.

Mishaps which former federal operators of the Asse project in Lower Saxony state overlooked or failed to report included water seepage in dry disposal chambers and unauthorized storage of highly radioactive waste, the Environment Ministry said today. The ministry is concerned the violations may jeopardize plans to store atomic waste at permanent sites.

Asse's former management, a disbanded federal-owned radiation research company called GSF GmbH, and the state's mining regulator will be ``probed for negligence and possibly sued,'' Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel told reporters in Berlin today. The findings of the report on Asse are a ``meltdown, perhaps the biggest setback for permanent storage.''

The Federal Office for Radiation Protection's report on the site may be an impediment for Germany's nuclear lobby, including Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats, campaigning to undo plans to close reactors by 2021. Gabriel, a Social Democrat, said his party's coalition partners have deliberately downplayed the dangers of storing atomic waste.

``Even if nuclear power gets an extension, you still have to store waste fuel safely,'' said Gabriel, who backs the plant closures. Nuclear fuel supplied about a quarter of Germany's power needs in 2007.

Water Leakage

The Office for Radiation Protection study showed water leakages in dry chambers went unreported as early as the 1960s, as did seepage of radioactive water from spent rod containers, Gabriel said.

The Asse project, set up in the early 1960s in former salt mines, has sparked protests over Germany's plans to find permanent storage for spent fuel.

In March, the mayor of Salzgitter lost a bid to prevent atomic waste being stored in a disused mine in the city. Judges at the Karlsruhe-based Constitutional Court ruled against an injunction brought by the city of 110,000, saying misgivings over the plan were ``not sufficiently justified.''

Gabriel called on the European Union to establish international standards for permanent storage that may support the government's contention that chosen sites are safe.

``Asse was a complete failure, a Swiss cheese of a salt mine,'' Gabriel said. Storage caverns in Salzgitter will be driven into clay at 1,230 meters (4,000 feet).

The federal government may assume direct control over Asse and permanent storage facilities at a later date, Gabriel said. The report cleared current Asse site operators, the Helmholtz Zentrum Muenchen, he added.

[dragon]

Wow wonder how many people have ended up sick from that.

[His Divine Shadow]

Quite possibly none.

[madd0ct0r]

quite probably none.

[Sea Skimmer]

The amount of liquid nuclear waste leaked into ground water, or dumped into rivers and oceans deliberately runs far past the millions of gallons. Hasn’t done much to kill the earth or anyone on it yet. Heck as I recall at least one of the men who repaired the reactor on K-19 (standing in highly radioactive water to do) actually survived to old age and death of another cause. It should be no surprise to anyone that humans are actually pretty resistant to radiation damage; we after all get bombarded with radiation from space and radioactive decay within the earth non stop and are spawned from genetic material that’s already been subject to that bombardment, but this is not to say that leaking nuclear waste is an acceptable thing.

[Tanasinn]

Great, just wait until the hysterical anti-nuke luddites hear about this one.

[His Divine Shadow]

They already have started using it. We need more info on this.

1. What kind of waste did they store? High/mid/low level waste? It was stored in barrels and not vitrified. So it doesn't seem like this is intended for permanent storage.

2. The spokesperson for the Asse II compound (great name BTW) says the barrels are at a depth of 950 meters and no danger to anyone. I don't think the groundwater usually goes below 500 meters? Not sure about this.

3. Caesium 137 is apparently part of the waste, spokesperson says the waste will be safe in 90 years.

[Dahak]

They already have started using it. We need more info on this.

1. What kind of waste did they store? High/mid/low level waste? It was stored in barrels and not vitrified. So it doesn't seem like this is intended for permanent storage.

They stored about 126.000 barrels of low and medium level wastes in the compound. It was intended, it seems, as a research compound for storing methods.

2. The spokesperson for the Asse II compound (great name BTW) says the barrels are at a depth of 950 meters and no danger to anyone. I don't think the groundwater usually goes below 500 meters? Not sure about this.

It seems they have no clue so far where the 12.000L water a day come from... But they don't know if and how the waste could influence the biosphere around it in the future.

[Sikon]

A leak deep inside a mine, about a kilometer underground?

While the operators were negligent, this is not on the level of an industrial accident actually killing anyone.

Normally one would think something making the news is causing significant harm, but that doesn't apply if it has the word "radiation" in it. Historically, there's a long tradition of media outlets giving large amounts of news coverage to even small radioactive leaks not necessarily exposing any member of the public to so much as a millirem.

Every 1000m cube of ground volume in between a deep underground leak and a person on the surface corresponds to more than a *trillion* kilograms that may be diluting mass, a better situation than surface contamination. Concentration is everything; non-high-level radioactive waste is going to be limited to begin with, and in this case diluted further from being deep underground before any eventually reaches the surface if practically ever.

When even every billion tons of the average rock naturally contains some weakly radioactive natural radioisotopes like thousands of tons of uranium and thorium alone at a few parts per million trace concentration, what matters is not whether there is radiation in itself but the quantitative amount and the concentration.

The Federal Office for Radiation Protection's report on the site may be an impediment for Germany's nuclear lobby, including Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats, campaigning to undo plans to close reactors by 2021. Gabriel, a Social Democrat, said his party's coalition partners have deliberately downplayed the dangers of storing atomic waste.

If radiation levels were really greatly raised at the surface or in the water supply, that would be quite detectable such as with even a few hundred dollars worth of equipment. (And I'm pretty sure the media would be reporting it if anything much elevated was measured, so that suggests not).

There is no quantitative evidence to conclude that this raised radiation exposure levels for the city's population essentially at all or even as much as they would get on a single airplane flight. This is an unfortunate incident, but there's nothing really suggesting it has health consequences remotely comparable to even one common lethal workplace accident in other major industries. But no-math uninformed public perceptions of such as this can significantly impact even a whole nation's policies.

[His Divine Shadow]

Sikon I think the issue is groundwater contamination.

And in light of that. Is it correct here to assume only Caesium-137 and Strontium-90 are the relevant potential dangers? AFAIK they are the only watersoluble isotopes, uranium and plutonium should not be harmful even if they got into the groundwater, they ought just sink to the bottom, and even if you drank it the GI tract would not absorb it.

[Sikon]

Uranium and plutonium should not be harmful even if they got into the groundwater, they ought just sink to the bottom, and even if you drank it the GI tract would not absorb it.

Metallic uranium is relatively insoluble, and, also, its oxides have low solubility. When uranium is in water or food consumed by a person, a lot of such passing through the body is not absorbed. The average person has an intake of ~ 0.7 milligrams of uranium per year from natural sources while the total staying in their body at a time is the lesser figure of ~ 0.09 milligrams. In contrast, for example, there's 4000 times more pCi of radioactivity in the average person from potassium-40 than uranium, with about 17 milligrams of it, a gamma-emitting radioisotope that has been a small portion of potassium everywhere since billions of years ago.

Plutonium is fairly similar to uranium in a lot of relevant regards, relatively insoluble. For example, typically 1/2000th as much plutonium will end up in solution as in nearby sediment or soil in contact with the water. Also, about 99.95% of ingested plutonium passes through the gastrointestinal track without absorption into the blood and just gets excreted ... not that any deep underground would much tend to reach the surface and end up in a human body rather than trillions of kilograms of rock anyway.

Is it correct here to assume only Caesium-137 and Strontium-90 are the relevant potential dangers? AFAIK they are the only watersoluble isotopes

With cesium being in the first column of the periodic table, it is chemically comparable to other alkali metals such as potassium and can be dissolved in water to a similarly high degree. And strontium is an alkaline metal. There would be some other radioisotopes too, but the preceding would likely be among the top handful of greatest significance.

Sikon I think the issue is groundwater contamination.

As said in the prior post, if radiation levels in the public water supply did rise significantly such would have appeared in measurements, not hard to test a sample periodically. For example, like radiation from concentrations of natural potassium-40 emitting a fraction-of-MeV-energy gamma and beta radiation can be detected and measured, so too can the fraction-of-a-MeV-energy gamma and beta radiation from Cesium-137 be detected and measured.

The concentration of diluted low-level radioactive waste stored in that Asse mine was ~ 22 GBq / barrel four decades ago, with decay since then. While there are 125000 barrels total, the amount actually leaked out is vastly less. There's also a lesser amount of medium-level waste; 1300 barrels were stored in the 1970s, of around 3800 GBq / barrel. For perspective, a 1000m cube of the average ground has on the order of 600000+ GBq from natural potassium-40 alone.

There has been some leakage with some radioactive brine in the mine since at least 1988. Deep underground, radiation levels are elevated well beyond standard regulatory limits if one was to stand there or drink the stuff. But, in contrast, here's an illustration of monitored radiation levels on the surface around the Asse mine:



Practically all of the variation from 0.6 mSv/yr to 1.0 mSv/year shown is from natural radioisotopes, which exist in varying concentrations in different minerals. There's always some variation, like this random illustration of a totally different geographical region (a map of Japan) showing such:



For perspective, worldwide, external exposure ranges usually between 0.6 and 1.6 mSv/year. Exposure from internal inhalation usually ranges from 0.2 to 10 mSv/year (nearly all from radon, occurring naturally as a decay product of uranium in the ground although building design influences exposure). That from ingested radioisotopes usually ranges from 0.2 to 0.8 mSv/year. The overall world average is 2.4 mSv from natural sources and 0.002 mSv from nuclear power.

(For an extreme case, here's a random illustration of a resort area in Brazil where 70000 people live around sand which can have radiation levels even between 40 mSv/year and 1000 mSv/year ... due to an exceptional concentration of naturally radioactive minerals, although that's really way above permissible under regular health standards).

Anyway, in contrast, when monitoring shows radiation levels on the order of 1 mSv/year above the Asse mine site, that's not really very high radioisotope concentration, rather radiation levels due to usual natural radioisotopes everywhere. It's not surprising since the waste stored there for decades is a kilometer underground surrounded by trillions of kilograms of rock. Although there isn't a convenient online image to insert here, water is likewise monitored.

While proper design and better handling than performed by the operators involved here should have avoided this leakage, it has its limits as a disaster.

Yet this is the "the most problematic nuclear facility in Europe" as the Spiegel describes and among the primary examples of the great harm from nuclear power perceived by the public which is leading to a planned nuclear phaseout over the coming decade in Germany with the last planned to be shutdown in 12 years. In reality, if they continue, they will go from currently about 28% nuclear power (2004 data), 61% fossil fuels (almost all coal) with 7% hydroelectric and renewables to have their power become far more based on coal when the first figure becomes 0%.

Really, some quantitative figures of detectable problematic exposure would be publicized and the nearby population would get evacuated if measurements detected a large amount compared to the usual natural levels. They don't.

It is unfortunate that most news stories covering events like this tend to act like the degree of risk always remains a mystery in order to raise public fears, as well as viewer interest of their customers, speaking as if public radiation exposure is an invisible undetectable menace rather than something rather readily measured and quantified.