Eric Schlosser exposes our Nuclear Delusions at Festival of Dangerous Ideas

Does Australia know what it’s signing up for? Picture: Jean-Christophe Verhaegen. Source: AFP

IT TOOK 20 years and an estimated $19 billion to build and all but the simplest of typos to shut it down.

A nuclear accident that has crippled a purpose-built waste storage facility serves as a terrifying warning to Australia.

As support for a potential nuclear power plant and waste disposal facility appears to grow in South Australia, where politicians are groping for ideas to stimulate the state’s flagging economy, investigative journalist Eric Schlosser has a cautionary tale that should make us think twice.

The US author of Command and Control has explored America’s nuclear weapons program and discovered how little errors and complacency have led to the US almost blowing itself up on a number of occasions.

An accident also occurred on Valentine’s Day last year at America’s only underground nuclear waste facility, when a radioactive drum burst open.

What’s more frightening is investigators later blamed the incident on someone putting the wrong type of kitty litter in the drum containing radioactive waste.

Despite being a pioneer of nuclear technology, even the US has struggled with how to manage the waste it produces.

The seemingly absurd error has crippled the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico, which was built for an estimated cost of about $19 billion, in an underground salt bed under the Southern New Mexico desert.

“It sounds great (economically) but you’ve got to know what you’re doing,” Schlosser told news.com.au.

“It’s really difficult to store this stuff, it’s really complicated ... good luck with that.”

For 15 years, WIPP was held up as a model facility for its safe design and operation, and one of only three such facilities in the world. It was supposed to house low and medium level radiation waste created as part of the US nuclear weapons program, for at least 10,000 years.

Kitty litter caused waste drum to burst open. Picture: US Department of Energy Source: Supplied

Drums of radioactive material were trucked in from around the US, where they were placed in salt caverns that would eventually be collapsed, burying the waste. Some even started advocating for high level waste to be buried there.

But in what seems an unbelievable chain of events, the addition of organic, instead of inorganic (clay) litter to the contents of a drum, created an explosive substance and led to it bursting open. Those investigating how this happened, have blamed it on a possible typo.

Before arriving at WIPP, the drum full of nitrate salts, was packaged at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Investigators discovered that a revised policy manual in 2012 instructed workers at the laboratory to use organic kitty litter to soak up excess liquid in drums of nitrate salts, instead of the correct inorganic, clay version.

Making matters worse, potential opportunities to discover the error did not pick up on it. Paperwork on the drum was also flawed and did not mention that the drum was unusually acidic and that a neutraliser and organic kitty litter was used to stabilise it, leaving workers at WIPP unaware that they were handling a potentially explosive substance.

After being transported to Panel 7, Room 7 of the underground facility, the drum burst open, its contents spurting out, releasing radiation into the facility. Twenty one workers were exposed to low levels of contamination but luckily no one was in the room at the time the drum burst and the incident was instead picked up by radiation sensors.

It’s believed the litter may also have been used in up to 5000 other containers, meaning they could also be potentially explosive. These containers have had to be buried in rooms that are now being sealed, while others were moved to a reinforced temporary storage site in case they also burst.

There are also concerns heat from the radiation leak could make surrounding barrels unstable.

Robert Alvarez, a nuclear waste expert and a former special assistant to the US energy secretary, told the New York Times that a safety analysis done before the WIPP facility opened, predicted one such incident every 200,000 years, but the facility had been open for just 15 years.

Now Mr Alvarez is not sure the site is safe, saying “I feel like I drank the Kool-Aid”.

View inside the room where a nuclear waste drum burst open. Picture: Courtesy of Department of Energy Source:Supplied

Defusing this potentially deadly situation is a complicated and long process. The facility has been closed since February last year and will likely not be operation again until next year. The US Department of Energy has estimated it will cost about $551 million to get the facility running again and to install a new ventilation system and exhaust shaft.

The accident has been blamed on complacency, declining safety standards and cutting corners.

An editorial for Nature magazine drew parallels between the accident at WIPP and the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, which was also blamed on the gradual decline of safety standards, a poor security culture, overconfidence and lack of independent technical oversight.

The problems at WIPP highlight the difficulty of designing systems to contain highly dangerous materials, which are not susceptible to human error.

In his book, Schlosser, who will be speaking on Nuclear Delusions at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas next month, has explored this in depth and does not believe systems can be made completely foolproof.

Schlosser’s book Command and Control includes the story of one of America’s most serious nuclear accidents, caused by an officer who accidentally dropped a socket wrench during routine maintenance and which resulted in the explosion of the largest intercontinental ballistic missile ever built by the US.

A decommissioned Titan II ballistic missile similar to the one that blew up in Arkansas. Picture: EPA/Jim Lo Scalzo.Source: AAP

The wrench fell and hit a Titan II missile, which was roughly the length of a nine-story building, and caused a fuel leak. Although officials managed to avoid detonating the nuclear weapon, the missile did explode at its launch facility in Arkansas, sending its nuclear warhead into a nearby ditch. 

Schlosser’s investigation of the little-reported incident, which could have led to the destruction of an entire US state, uncovered a frightening sequence of events that led him to conclude that humans are “better at creating complicated machines than controlling them”.

The US author questions whether nuclear technology can ever be totally safe, and said machines were also susceptible to bugs, as anyone who has used a computer would have experienced. “A nuclear weapon is a machine and a machine can go wrong,” he told news.com.au.

Schlosser said storing highly dangerous materials for tens of thousands of years was also not something he thought humans were up to as a species.

Even the United Nation’s redesign of the universal radiation symbol in 2007 to ensure future humans, or even aliens, would understand there was potentially deadly material buried, seemed absurd, he said.

The United Nations' new symbol for dangerous radiation was released in 2007. Source: Supplied

He also thought it was possible that building a nuclear waste storage facility in Australia, which stockpiled high level waste that could be reprocessed into fuel for nuclear weapons, may make the country a target for terrorists.

“The challenge of storing nuclear waste safely is huge,” Schlosser said, adding nuclear waste could also be used to make a dirty bomb that spread plutonium dust over a few kilometres, not just for nuclear weapons.

“These are real concerns, I just would think ... there are other ways to drive economic activity (in Australia) besides accepting nuclear waste,” he said.

Already anti-nuclear activists have broken into high security facilities in America, proving it could be done.

“I’m glad they believe in peace, love and understanding, rather than killing in the name of God,” Schlosser said.

The first load of radioactive waste arrives at WIPP on March 26, 1999. Picture: AP Photo/Thomas Herbert Source: AP

Schlosser believes the world’s biggest nuclear risk currently was from terrorists making a weapon or stealing one, or the possibility of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. He believes the only way to be truly safe would be to reduce the stockpile of weapons to the bare minimum.

Despite the risks, Schlosser said he did not think nuclear destruction was inevitable but people needed to know about the problems to create change.

“What I’m trying to do is get people to open their eyes, to be aware,” he said.

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