refer to previous subject: Tar Balls in my coffee...
Now with the glow in the dark OR daylight feature!

The DOE has been lying about this for years... I remember being home sick once in the 90s and having cable on and watching some hearing with the DOE over Hanford. My B.S. detector was off the charts... If their lips were moving that day, it was another lie..

Go by death rays...

The parallels between the Gulf and Hanford are quite important: in both cases, the ruling agency is completely compromised by its dual nature as both regulator and initiator of the technology.

If you want anything done right at Hanford, it would require getting rid of DOE as the agency in charge and putting in charge a cleanup-only agency, either EPA or, plausibly, US Army Corps of Engineers, which has a lot of experience moving a lot of dirt.

As long as DOE runs the show there, you can expect nothing but a reply of Iraq and Afghanistan on the Columbia, billions of dollars poured into the illusion of progress and gigantic edifices that will only become monuments to ignorance and arrogance (embassies, giant bases, Waste Vit plants).

GAS is rather right on. As I now have a close affiliation with the "water protection" management(now is that a "green" title or what?).

The crap is there and it's nasty. It HAS to be cleaned up! But oops... their is a lot of money and politics involved!

We no longer have a need for energy or defense management (or that kind of thinking).
Like GAS said, its a lot of moving dirt. Also a lot like the nerve gas work at Umatilla.
Not easy but spendy.

Get it out of politics!

Get it out of politics!

Never happen, nor should it. It is the proper venue since it was created by the US Government.

Better is to get the bad out of politics.

At any rate this is not a subject for the lay person.

Maybe i misspoke, considering the president is commander in chief. GAS was pointing out that other (government)agency's are better at fixing the current cleanup issues.
My issue is manipulating data and money for political reasons. Lets say the DOD made the bombs and they would say "we did it clean and green!" and only a ton of insignificant waste was made. Only 1/10 of one percent! We are heroes! Then the EPA comes along and says uh sorry, we need bookobillions because it is more like 10,000 tons and it is Nasty Nasty stuff. somewhere in that is about 1% of the truth.

And what is your definition of a "lay person" that we shouldn't concern ourself with?

Jaysus Lawrence, since there are few with spines, integrity or intelligence left in politics.... it should be a subject for anyone who cares enough to get educated... as for the lay person tag... I cannot even begin to tell you how ignorant you sound... just so you know for a number of years, the expert in mushroom poisonings in Oregon has been someone who would qualify as a lay person but all the medical examiners and doctors and stuff rely on her self educated expertise when there is a poisoning... now quit being so simple and realize that the world does work according the rules you believe in.

We all qualify as a lay person in something. A lay person in nuclear waste could be very dangerous.

As for ignorance, I did a stint, in the late 50's at Argonne National Labs in Reactor Engineering.

So tell me, what are the rules? You seem to know.

This is garbage disposal. It's not rocket science. Anyone with an eighth grade education can understand enough about the basic health physics of radiation to make up his or her mind about what risks he or she is willing or unwilling to take. The nuclear "experts," meanwhile, have shown time and again that they can't be trusted to tell the truth about risks -- neither the probability nor the severity of potential damage. Which leads us to where we are today.

Well Lawrence there seem to be several sets of rules.. one for the government, another for the rich, another for corporations, and the ones the rest of us are supposed to live by.... however, I come from a long line of people who don't follow stupid rules.... some of my ancestors dumped tea into Boston Harbor and ran the "legal" rules out of the territory... The deal is that Steve Jobs had it right when he said..."Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes... the ones who see things differently -- they're not fond of rules... You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things... they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do."

I had a conversation with a nuclear physicist this evening after shipping him the NYT article. He, like most of us, distrusts the government. So do I. But again, he who makes the mess cleans it up.

Here's one, pretty good way:

http://www.usec.com/megatonstomegawatts.htm

Interesting link Lawrence, I noted the conversion happens in Russia.
Isn't converting/refining illegal in the States-part of the reason we have problems with recycling the stuff?

By the time the plutonium waste reaches the riverbed, there won't be a Columbia River because the Canadian icefields that provide the water will be long gone because of global warming. Cheer up, man!

Cootie, suspect you were joking but, alas, if only you were right -- but, as river flow drops, the waste in the sediments all along the banks (and connected to the river via groundwater, which seeps into the river throughout its course, carrying contaminants) becomes a rising concentration in the Columbia. And as river depth and pressure drops, more inseepage from the shore will occur, adding a greater numerator to go with the reduced denominator in the concentration equation.

Remember, DOE's primary strategy for dealing with nasties -- the many PCBs and transuranics entering the river at Hanford -- is simple: "Dilution is the solution to pollution!"

dman, you are correct about the legality.

Not just Russia, but France and Japan recycle plutonium.