A new report from the federal Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board about ongoing problems at Hanford portrays the ugliest face of American engineering: a hugely expensive technical nightmare exacerbated by disregard for safety. This is the same combination that spawned lethal accidents-waiting-to-happen in the Space Shuttle program, where major contractors ignored design flaws, proceeded on the basis of insufficient testing, and stifled professional dissent. Too much money and machismo create deadly technologies, a hard-won lesson from history that is playing out again at Hanford.
The report contains a litany of fundamental errors that have resulted in what the Board calls a “potential threat to public health and safety”–no doubt using the palliating adjective only because not to do so would officially trigger a national emergency, which is what the situation obviously is anyway. It confirms that the Department of Energy (DOE) has known since last August that one of the newer double-shell underground tanks containing highly radioactive waste is leaking, in addition to the many old single-walled tanks that have already drained at least a million gallons of waste into the ground. To boot, “many of the double-shell tanks currently have enough flammable gas retained in the waste that, if released in the tank headspace, could create a flammable atmosphere”–that is, they could blow up–and the waste continuously generates such gas. Furthermore, DOE has “not resolved key technical issues” with the design of a $12+ billion waste treatment plant under construction since 2001 with no end in sight. In plain language, the contractor, Bechtel National, has been building a plant for the past decade without really knowing how to do it.
One “key technical assumption” behind a critical element of the plant “was not supported by test data.” This just happens to be part of the plant where faults could cause “nuclear criticality accidents, explosions of flammable gases, and mechanical failures,” a specter raised by the Board in 2010 and still unresolved.
In 2010, the Board also expressed concern to DOE regarding a “change in its safety strategy” about hydrogen hazards in the plant. Namely, DOE “approved a strategy that allows hydrogen explosions in piping under certain conditions, and relies on a Quantitative Risk Analysis (QRA) and other complex models to predict the magnitude of the explosions and the response of the piping system.” The Board “remains concerned that DOE has not yet developed a QRA that demonstrates that explosions would not lead to a breach of the primary confinement in process piping and vessels.” Translated for laymen, this means that DOE decided to tolerate such violence inside the plant’s structure, based on immature computer models that still cannot predict whether the plant would blast itself open to the environment.
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Far more troubling than these blunders that would flunk any undergraduate out of engineering college is the Board’s finding that a “flawed safety culture” was “inhibiting the ability to (1) identify and address long-standing technical issues and (2) resolve conflicts between the engineering and nuclear safety to ensure safety controls were integrated into the facility design.” Though the Board commended Secretary of Energy Steven Chu for having “vigorously tackled” this trouble after a Bechtel manager blew the whistle in 2010, it warned that “changing any organizational culture is historically slow” and that “fundamental differences between [plant] engineering and nuclear safety must still be resolved.” In other words, Bechtel is dragging its feet while dangerous problems continue.