| I'm not sure that's a entirely fair description of the accident. > CEMRC's independent monitoring data shows that except for the brief detection of americium and plutonium in the nearby ambient air samplers, there is no persistent contamination and no lasting increase in radiological contaminants near WIPP that can be attributed to the 2014 radiation release. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02659... Specifically, vastly more radiation is released by coal plants and yet more is included via ash into civil building materials. It also reopened in 2017 and the "bypass" was a leak around a filter, not deliberate misconfiguration like it sounds in the article, and exposure was within limits and on the scale of chest x-rays at the maximum. Also it's only possible for the currently open "panels" to be connected to the ventilation system. Once they're sealed they're no longer able to vent to the surface at all, so it's a failure mode that is mostly irrelevant to long term storage. A additional deliberate feature of the site is that the salt is self-sealing. For any "mission zero" system, there will be scathing reports about process flaws afterwards, because any mistake at all is unacceptable. But this doesn't actually translate into a major harm. In this case, there was a vehicle fire that damaged equipment, a breached barrel due to a mistake in filling it with the wrong cat litter, and a filter leak, and an entire "comedy" of other poor processes in place and yet the effect was undetectable outside within months (and that's really saying something for radiation detection). Sounds like it worked pretty well to me, to be honest. It's pretty much the worst possible case, short of actually setting off a bomb in there. The really high level material isn't packed into these kinds of barrels or is dispersible either - it's in solid form. There'd be similar reports about "never events" when a plane wheel falls off and the plane crash lands with no injuries. Should it ever have happened? No. We there bad processes at play? Presumably. Can we learn and improve? Yes. Should we conclude air travel is a non-starter? No. And a plane crash would easily kill hundreds, far more than any nuclear waste release from such a site ever could even in the absolute worst of the worst cases. |
I think you're lacking imagination here. The Asse II mine in Germany[1] is in danger of getting flooded, which could release large amounts of radioactive material into the groundwater.