Talk:Waste Isolation Pilot Plant

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[edit] Email to CEMRC Director

I have written an email to the director of the CEMRC, asking him to make changes to his recent edits to bring them in line with WP:STYLE and WP:CITE. Unless an expert is able to make these changes, the information will eventually have to be removed from the article, a most undesirable outcome given its anemic state. Angio (talk) 20:59, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Suggested changes

I'd like to make a few suggested changes to the WIPP description. The waste acceptance criteria for WIPP was an arbitrary decision made for non-scientific reasons. Geologically, technically and scientifically, WIPP can perform for any waste at any activity level, including commercial spent fuel. Properties such as the amount of liquid, venting of gas, and activity levels are for shipping only, they do not affect the repository performance at WIPP.

The key to WIPP's performance is the plastic properties of the salt that do not allow fractures or openings to be maintained more than a few dozens of years, and the lack of tectonic activity in the area. The Salado salt formation at WIPP has been undisturbed for over 200 milion years. Unlike hard rock sites such as Yucca Mountain or most of the proposed international high-level waste sites that are fractured, there is no need for engineered barriers at WIPP and the containers holding the waste are for shipping only. They are assumed to breach and corrode immediately upon room closure. Breaching and corrosion of the breached drums is a positive as it keeps the aqueous system reducing, making plutonium immobile in any water that does get in. This is important to counter the small amount of hypochlorite and peroxide that can form from dissociation of the chloride brine by alpha-radiolysis (free hydrogen is not formed). In a chloride brine, peroxide acts as a reductant not an oxidant. The oxidant is hypochlorite which is immediately scavanged and reduced by the overwhelming amount of iron and metals such as Al in the waste and the containers, a purposeful design of the repository and bourne out by many experiments under site conditions. However, even if Pu is oxidized, the salt is so tight (10^-12 m/s) that it cannot leave the rooms unless humans drill into the area, and not just drill once, but drill repeatedly and hit multiple hypothetical pressurized brine pockets, and then only if these futuristic humans forget how to make cement and do not seal their boreholes. However, repository licensing requires a failure scenario, so human intrusion was chosen as there are no natural failure mechanisms for this salt. Licensing also requires an engineered barrier, so particulate MgO is emplaced along with the waste as it scavanges water, carbon dioxide and maintains an aqueous pH of about 9.5, ideal for immobilizing Pu and colloids. That 230 million year old seawater, with intact organics (cellusosics and some DNA fragments) is still trapped throughout this formation is a better testament to its stability than any numerical model could provide.

As to the fluid inclusion issue, the water content in the salt is extremely low (between 0.5 and 1.5% by volume) and exists primarily as fluid inclusions of brine and brine along grain boundaries. Fluid inclusions have been studied extensively with respect to high activity waste disposal because inclusions can migrate under a significant thermal gradient, e.g., 1.5°C/cm, by dissolution of salt on the up-gradient side and re-precipitation on the down-gradient side. This process encourages brine to migrate towards the waste. In most international high-level waste programs, this has been viewed as a problem because the canisters and any engineered barriers are required to survive intact anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 years and interactions with brine, however small the volumes, could be detrimental to canister life. However, in the Salado Formation at WIPP, the canister does not need to survive after emplacement, there is no need for engineered barriers, and a halo of increased water content within or around the disturbed rock zone is of no consequence from a repository performance standpoint. In addition, after fluid inclusions have migrated and the salt has recrystallized behind them, the hydraulic conductivity is still less than 10^-12 m/s and the diffusion coefficient is less than 10^-14m^2/s because of the low water content. In fact, the performance assessment of WIPP assumes a totally flooded repository with completely breached and corroded containers, and still passes given the worst-case scenarios.

Separately from the long-term performance, the operational safety of WIPP has been ideal, better than any other operation in the United States or any human endeavor in history. Over 250,000 55-gallon drum equivalents of nuclear waste have been disposed of at WIPP. CEMRC has been independently monitoring the air, water, soil, and people in a 100-mile radius of WIPP from 7 years before WIPP opened to the present 9 years after nuclear waste has been shipping to WIPP. The underground air and any gases coming out of the waste after the room is sealed. While we can see the effects in Carlsbad from dust storms in China, we can see if someone is a body builder (increased K-40 in muscle), the effects of smoking (U and Cs-137 in tobacco) and other extremely low-level effects, we cannot see any signature from WIPP, not in people who work at WIPP, live near WIPP, or that WIPP even exists. 128.123.68.158 (talk) 17:46, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

I agree the current article is weak. However, rather than providing the info in this discussion article, why not put them in the Wiki article itself if you have the knowledge. My suggestion is to (1) sign yourself up as an registered Wiki contributor; (2) make your changes in pieces so that fellow contributors can focus on each piece; and (3) use references to either other Wiki articles or external refs to support your points. PJG 15:55, 30 March 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Giersp (talk • contribs)