Recovery of Tritium from Tritiated Waste Water Cost-Effectiveness Analysis; Tritium Can Be Filtered But It’s Cheaper to Dump

Tags

Bonneville Power, BPA, Columbia Generating Station, contaminated water, cryogenic distillation, DOE, Fukushima, Fukushima water, groundwater, Hanford, Iran, Japan, magnesium bed, Moniz, New Deal, nuclear accident, nuclear clean-up, nuclear energy, nuclear waste, Pacific Ocean, palladium, Palladium membrane, radiation, Radionuclides, Switzerland, TEPCO, tritiated water, tritium, tritium filtration, Washington State

Tritium can be filtered out of tritiated water. It’s just cheaper to dump the waste into the ocean.

“Japan announces date for Fukushima radioactive water release” Greenpeace International 22 August 2023 https://www.greenpeace.org/international/press-release/61364/japan-announces-date-for-fukushima-radioactive-water-release/

Excerpts from our 2015 post: https://miningawareness.wordpress.com/2015/04/13/recovery-of-tritium-from-tritiated-waste-water-cost-effectiveness-analysis/
The US government (Drake-LANL, 1996) study, “Recovery of Tritium from Tritiated Waste Water Cost-Effectiveness Analysis” (see images below) was written by a physicist who holds an MBA, and did years of Ph.D. work in economics. Tritiated water is radioactive water. It is striking that his study opens up by saying: “Tritiated water is many 1000s of times more biologically toxic than tritium gas due to our water-based body’s propensity to incorporate tritiated water into its very makeup,” whereas currently the nuclear industry, of which the US DOE and NRC are acting as branches, rather than regulators, pretend that it is safe because it is dispersed throughout the body, even though this runs counter to logic. It must be clarified, as well, that he does not mean evaporated tritiated water, which is very dangerous upon inhalation and skin absorption, but rather pure tritium gas.

He states: “The Tritium Systems Test Assembly group at Los Alamos has developed a Palladium Membrane Reactor/ Isotope Separation System (PMR/ISS) to treat tritiated water. A waste-free effluent is produced composed of CO and CO2 which can be directly stacked to the environment. It is simple to operate and reliable using well-established technologies (palladium permeator and catalytic reactor, and cryogenic distillation). Tritium is recovered for storage and recycle with a recovery efficiency of 99.999999%. Cost is believed to be about one third that of the current baseline Magnesium treatment technology, and may be even better once scale-up of the prototype has been accomplished. The PMR/ISS technology exceeds pollution prevention goals by eliminating all pollution. It also recovers tritium for storage and future use, capturing any value associated with a shadow price for tritium.” (Drake-LANL, 1996).

Evaporation of tritiated water, being proposed for Fukushima, along with dumping, would result in tritiated water vapor and would poison Japan, depending on wind direction, and probably China, Korea, Russia and even the Americas, as well, if it does not rain upon the ocean first. Why is dumping or evaporation of tritiated water being proposed, rather than filtration? Why the misinformation regarding tritium filtration? Companies are being paid at Fukushima, supposedly to filter the tritium, among other radionuclides. Three companies are being paid by Japan to filter tritium! Russian State owned RosRAO (subsidiary of Rosatom); GE Hitachi Canada and Kurion, which is based in the US, but appears French owned and operated. Billions are being spent at Fukushima, as in the US Nuclear complexes and for what? So that contractors can take the money and run, rather than doing the work? Are they being paid to filter the tritiated water, only to dump it into the Pacific Ocean or evaporate it into the atmosphere?

Kurion is being paid by the Japanese government to reduce tritium in water from 1 to 5 million becquerels per liter to 60,000 or less becquerels per liter, according to a Kurion document on the US government web site. Why is a percentage filtration rate not given? This looks like a 94% rate for 1 million and a 99% rate for 5 million. But, if they start with 60,000 does it still remain at 60,000 Bq/l? A becquerel is a radioactive emission per second and a liter is about the size of two small water or cola bottles. Why pay Kurion to reduce the tritium levels when an earlier technology results in 99.999999% elimination?

http://export.gov/japan/build/groups/public/@eg_jp/documents/webcontent/eg_jp_071185.pdf (Read the rest of the Kurion power point at the US Export link above).

Clean-up of waste is costly and energy intensive, but there is still a large amount of fleecing going on. Part of that fleecing is State and Federally (US DOE) owned power stations-power grids charging the US DOE for energy, all while charging the private sector at cost. The Columbia Generating Station seems to belong to Washington State and local municipalities, but the transmission lines seem to belong to the Federal Government (BPA-DOE). Insanely, the DOE is being sued because it has not taken away nuclear waste from the Columbia Generating Station (there’s no place to take it), but the BPA, which is owned by the Federal government (DOE),”markets the electricity from thirty-one federal hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River and its tributaries, as well as from the Columbia Generating Station, a nuclear plant located on the Hanford Site in eastern Washington. BPA has more than 15,000 miles (24,000 km) of electrical lines and 300 substations in the Pacific Northwest and controls approximately 75 percent of the high-voltage (230 kV and higher) transmission capacity in the region.[1]…”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonneville_Power_Administration Bonneville, like the TVA, was a major US government works project, dating to the New Deal. It is Federally owned and should be used to clean-up a Federal mess at Hanford! Washington State should also participate-comply in the clean-up, since it benefits from cheap Federal electricity and the Federal electric grid, which allowed development of the state and region.

The 1996 Baker study speaks repeatedly of “pollution prevention goals”, and “pollution prevention objectives”, which are to be achieved. By 2014 this idea seems to have been literally dumped, along with tritium into groundwater. Under Hazel O’Leary-Bill Clinton there was some consideration of health, which seems to have flown out the window with Bush, Obama-Moniz, etc. The US DOE has a yearly budget of almost $30 billion, much ear-marked for cleanup, so where is the money going if not for clean-up? For the hotel room alone and excluding the hotel rooms for security, excluding food, etc, the head of the US DOE, Moniz, spent US taxpayer $23,000 for 5 weeks in a luxury Swiss hotel (Beau Rivage Palace, Lausanne) to negotiate a “deal” with Iran. Even in Switzerland, he could have found a hotel for 1/6th of the price. If he’s still there then it’s around $30,000. No one wants to know how much his whiskey, room service, hotel rooms for security, etc., cost. The $23,000 probably excludes hotel tax. The cheapest restaurants are pricey in Switzerland and room service; luxury hotel restaurant will be higher. (Sadly Hazel O’Leary had to step down because of supposedly spending too much on hotels, probably because she wanted to clean-up the nuclear mess and investigated human radiation experiments.) And for what was Moniz spending this taxpayer money? To bring Iranian nuclear waste to dump on America in the name of non-proliferation? No one has mentioned this, but it seems in the cards. Iran can make more. And, why has the US become the dumping ground of international nuclear waste when it has no room or place to secure its own? What is the meaning of nuclear security when the US is engaging in and allowing the poisoning of the people and the land with radiation from nuclear reactors, dumps and labs all of the time? And, importing foreign nuclear waste to boot? Furthermore, Canada has been educating Iranians for decades in labs used by the Manhattan project and in labs where Rutherford, who discovered alpha radiation, worked (U of Montreal; McGill U). If Iran is a terrorist state why wasn’t anything done against Canada for educating Iranians for decades?

How is it that “Tepco projects ¥130 billion pretax profit for year” (about 1 billion US dollars) in 2014 only, according to the Japan Times, Oct. 25, 2014, and they are simply dumping radioactive water into the Pacific? The phytoplankton (plants) in the ocean provide most of the oxygen for the earth. So, whether or not you care about fish or ocean mammals or radioactive rain, there is a life and death issue going on here. The phytoplankton would be near the surface of the water, as is much of the radioactive waste water. Already, since 1950, shortly after the start of the nuclear age, the amount of phytoplankton has declined by 40%. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytoplankton US west coast sardine population declined starting in the same period.

The price of filtering tritium appears to have come down enormously in the last 20 years, since Drake (1996) is citing $1,250 per liter as a figure and in 2014 the US DOE cites about 50 to 80 cents per liter. The US DOE gives energy costs of 12 to 50 cents per liter, and this is the major cost of filtration. In 2014, the US DOE was also whining about the high percentage of energy which would need to be used from the Columbia Generating Station, if tritium were filtrated, whereas it is Washington State and local owned. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Generating_Station
As well, there is the Bonneville Power (BPA) hydro system which is Federally owned and actually belongs to the US DOE. It sells power at cost (see bottom of post). Hence, the electricity for the clean-up at Hanford should be free. And, private companies should be charged a fee, rather than getting electricity at cost. This shows just how distorted and even mentally disturbed the US government is. The US DOE concludes that it is cheaper to just dump the tritium, rather than filtering it. But, the electricity and grid are government owned! The Federally owned BPA needs to give electricity to the Federal government and sell electricity to the private sector for a profit to compensate.

This also means that wind turbines and solar at Fukushima, or in the environs, would reduce the price of filtering tritium. Dealing with nuclear waste is extremely energy intensive. Sellafield in the UK no longer produces energy but has its own gas fired generating station and takes additional electricity from the grid.

“There are currently more than 200 grams of tritium in about 1800 liters of stored waste water throughout the DOE complex,” says Drake. This clearly excludes the contaminated ground water, and is a very low figure, but useful for comparison. At the $1,250 per liter this would come out to $2.25 million, which pales in comparison with the billions allegedly being spent for clean-up. However, the US DOE 2014 report puts the price at around 50 cents per liter for filtration and a quarter of a cent for dumping. This assumes, of course, that they would pay the BPA for state and federal electricity! But, this drops the price to around $900, which someone could easily collect door-to-door to save the Columbia river. But, no, they prefer to pay around $45 just to dump it, which is far less than the $642 per night paid for Moniz in Lausanne. He could have stayed for as “cheap” as $489 at the same hotel, if he didn’t have the lakeside view which he seems to have had, based on the NYT picture. That excludes his security team. And, you can bet that he probably had a suite in the $1,000 range, rather than the $642 double room. While hotels are comparatively expensive in Switzerland, he still could have stayed at a $120 a night hotel, since the US DOE thinks they can’t afford to clean the water and that the fish and people must drink tritium instead! So, while Moniz pays an exorbitant price, on the back of the American taxpayer, to hang out and negotiate with his Iranian homologue in Switzerland, probably playing chess, while drinking whiskey (says NYT), or more likely absinthe, the US DOE penny pinches on tritium clean-up?

Unlike today, in 1996, under Bill Clinton-Hazel O’Leary, the DOE was willing to entertain the idea of clean-up and public health:

LA-UR-97-3767 June 1996, entire 12 pages at link: https://fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/lib-www/la-pubs/00326809.pdf