Michele Kearney's Nuclear Wire - Major Energy and Environmental News and Commentary affecting the Nuclear Industry. Nuclear Activities
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Analysis Triples U.S. Plutonium Waste Figures
The amount of plutonium buried at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State is nearly three times what the federal government previously reported, a new analysis indicates, suggesting that a cleanup to protect future generations will be far more challenging than planners had assumed.
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From http://phronesisaical.blogspot.com/2010/07/show-your-work.html
ReplyDeleteShow Your Work!
If I wanted to check the numbers on how much plutonium might still be in the environment, I’d go to the records on production, check to see if there were any updated reports, and I’d check the records of what has happened to the plutonium since. The biggest changes will be in the plutonium that has been recovered from decommissioned plants and from the environment in contrast to earlier estimates, along with reclassifications resulting from plutonium removed from weapons as a result of treaties.
I would set up a table with a column showing the earlier numbers and another showing the changed numbers, with references for all the numbers. Or maybe two tables: one with categories of how the plutonium was used (Nagasaki, weapons tests, research, lost to environment, etc.) and one with where the plutonium is. This sort of accounting for how much plutonium was produced against how much we know we have is called a mass balance.
Unfortunately, that is not what Robert Alvarez chose to do in his report claiming that the US plutonium inventory has gone up. I can’t make the numbers from Alvarez’s report add up to a mass balance, because he doesn’t supply all of them, and the ones he does supply are not all comparable. It’s possible he’s got a mass balance somewhere, but, if he does, he’s reporting only selected numbers.