Not really a catastrophe, more like “problem”.
Yes, but "problem" doesn't have "cat" in it
When Kitty Litter Caused a Nuclear Catastrophe
71–80 of 92 posts
Re: When Kitty Litter Caused a Nuclear Catastrophe
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Electronics tend to fail at dosages (20 greys or so) similar to what destroys your nervous system.
I'm a non-bio person. Is that a coincidence, or is that because of similarity between our nervous system and electronics?
> Is that a coincidence
Mostly it's about penetration.
Any radiation that can get through your skin can do damage. Once that happens, the question is then how much flux is there doing damage.
Re: When Kitty Litter Caused a Nuclear Catastrophe
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
They could, if they were specced correctly. Wasn't the story that they intentionally requested robots hardened against lower radiation level than required to not disclose the true extent of the catastrophe? So the German company that built them underspecced the shielding and so they died quickly.
> specced Totally orthogonal, but you just reminded me of a pet peeve I have. This word is correct, but I can't stand it. I wish we spelled this "specked", even though that has a homonym. Like trafficked, panicked, frolicking, etc. "specced" makes my brain wince.
Maybe spec'd
Re: When Kitty Litter Caused a Nuclear Catastrophe
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the link: In May 2012, Los Alamos published a white paper titled “Amount of Zeolite Required to Meet the Constraints Established by the EMRTC Report RF 10-13: Application of LANL Evaporator Nitrate Salts.” In other words, “How much kitty litter should be added to radioactive waste?” The answer was about 1.2 to 1, inorganic zeolite clay to nitrate salt waste, by volume. That guidance was then translated into the…
That's... a shocking level of lack of professionalism. I mean, as a software developer, when someone tells you to implement something, do you do it just based on the notes you took while your project manager discussed the task with you, or do you read the actual Jira ticket and use the information you (hopefully) find there? And we're (mostly) not writing software that handles nuclear waste...
Something to consider is that in a secure environment like LANL, and especially for a non-standard or one-off process, it's likely that there is no computer system that everyone has access to with all the information.
It would not be unusual for the person being told to write the process document to be brought into a room with a notebook, be shown written or electronic materials in the room, take notes in a provided notebook, have that notebook be handed over after the meeting for a (non-technical) security review, then receive the notebook pages some days/weeks later and have those notes be what is used to develop the document. Security culture is good for security but bad for error-free processes involving people.
Re: When Kitty Litter Caused a Nuclear Catastrophe
#75This may be hijacking the thread,
but I had an interesting experience lately.
Bear with me,
Los Alamos National Laboratory is part of the story.
I'm a film photographer, and I had been taking my color film to a lab to be processed and scanned. A couple of months ago the lab let me know that the turnaround time for scanning would be a couple of weeks instead of a few days. Some two months later, I still had not gotten my film back. I went to the lab and spoke with the owner, and he said that LANL was sending him so much film to develop and scan that he couldn't get to his other customers, and he expected that the volume would increase. He was nice enough to give me my undeveloped film and and refund the prepaid bill.
I did not ask, as I didn't want to piss of the owner, but I have many questions. Why is LANL sending so much film to a lab for developing? Why can't LANL set up their own film developing and scanning lab, it's not nuclear engineering, it just requires some equipment and a little expertise. Why now? Why are the even using film these days? Why did the lab's owner feel it necessary to prioritize LANL's business over others, rather than putting it in the queue to wait its turn?
Re: When Kitty Litter Caused a Nuclear Catastrophe
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm surprised they made critical material purchasing decisions based on what some guy thinks he heard in a meeting Right? We don't store nuclear waste where I work ... BUT one time we needed to buy a bunch of ethernet cables, basically the same thing. We wrote down our requirements, came up with some options. The engineers evaluated the options before purchasing and checked what we received before installing it. Th…
The difference is that in a large organization the people documenting the procedure, the people doing the procurement, the people receiving the order and the people packing the drums are all different people. Potentially in different buildings. You can't expect the original scientist who wrote the white paper based on experiments in a glovebox to be present every time they pack waste into drums.
Oh and it gets even worse when there are bean counters at the end of the procurement chain.
Re: When Kitty Litter Caused a Nuclear Catastrophe
#77This may be hijacking the thread, but I had an interesting experience lately. Bear with me, Los Alamos National Laboratory is part of the story. I'm a film photographer, and I had been taking my color film to a lab to be processed and scanned. A couple of months ago the lab let me know that the turnaround time for scanning would be a couple of weeks instead of a few days. Some two months later, I still had not gotten…
>Why can't LANL set up their own film developing and scanning lab
Are you asking why a government agency can't just magic up random money and employees during a time the parent government is saying privatization and getting rid of government employees is the way to go?
Re: When Kitty Litter Caused a Nuclear Catastrophe
#78This may be hijacking the thread, but I had an interesting experience lately. Bear with me, Los Alamos National Laboratory is part of the story. I'm a film photographer, and I had been taking my color film to a lab to be processed and scanned. A couple of months ago the lab let me know that the turnaround time for scanning would be a couple of weeks instead of a few days. Some two months later, I still had not gotten…
>Why can't LANL set up their own film developing and scanning lab Are you asking why a government agency can't just magic up random money and employees during a time the parent government is saying privatization and getting rid of government employees is the way to go?
No.
Perhaps I should have noted that LANL was established in 1943.
They obviously used film,
and more obviously would not have sent it to some random lab for processing.
Did they lose that capability?
Also, LANL is an exception to general gutting of federal agencies. It's been given a record budget this FY. https://sourcenm.com/briefs/lanl-expecting-boon-from-congres... That budget was set in the Biden administration. The current administration wants to resume nuclear weapons testing. https://www.npr.org/2025/10/30/nx-s1-5590818/trump-nuclear-t...
Speaking of privatization, LANL is privately managed and operated by Triad National Security, LLC.
Re: When Kitty Litter Caused a Nuclear Catastrophe
#79I keep asking this question: "Hot" nuclear waste means theres still a lot of energy left to capture. Why are we disposing of materials that still have a lot of energy to capture? Seems like the closer we get to lead, in terms of capture, the better. It would be like taking my half-full of gas car to the pump, dumping the existing gas, and getting fresh. Its a waste of energy, waste of resources, and generates worse n…
That's not what "hot" means in this context. "Hot" means "highly radioactive", i.e. high number of decay events per second, high concentration of short half-life isotopes, high power/volume resulting from radioactive decay.
Nuclear reactors do not work off radioactive decay. U-235, for example has a half life of 704 million years. Radioisotope thermal electric generators [0] by contrast do run off radioactive decay, an isotopes used for that application have short half-lives, such as Pu-238 with 87.7 years.
Commercial nuclear reactors use unenriched or minimally enriched fuel. This means that, within a fairly short period of time, the percentage of fissile material in the fuel drops to the point where continuing to use it is no longer economical. At that point the fuel is a mixture of extremely hot fission products, transuranics, unreacted fuel, and non-fissile (but fertile) isotopes such as U-238.
It's not practical to use the decay energy from the fission products for power. What would make much more sense would be to remove the fission products and recycle the fuel that remains into new fuel (for a reactor that's designed to use it). This would be a much more efficient use of mined nuclear fuel (allowing nuclear power to be used for thousands of years), it would vastly reduce the volume of nuclear waste, and it would mean nuclear waste would only be hazardous for decades to centuries.
The US was on the path to this with the Integral Fast Reactor and Pyroprocessing [1] developed by the Argonne National Laboratory. This was killed [2] in 1994 by the Clinton administration. Not for any technical reason, but because it was a "threat to nuclear non-proliferation". How that makes sense when, to the best of my knowledge the process developed by Argonne couldn't be used to produce weapons-grade material, and even if it could the US already had nuclear weapons so it wouldn't be proliferating it to a non-nuclear country, I don't know. But, apparently, since some other forms of nuclear waste reprocessing can be used to generate weapons-grade material (by extracting Pu-239), it was a bad symbol so it had to go.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Integral_fast_rea...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Integral_fast_rea...
Re: When Kitty Litter Caused a Nuclear Catastrophe
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
They could, if they were specced correctly. Wasn't the story that they intentionally requested robots hardened against lower radiation level than required to not disclose the true extent of the catastrophe? So the German company that built them underspecced the shielding and so they died quickly.
The real story is a little less dramatic - it got stuck, and that meant it was exposed to the radiation for much longer than planned.
That doesn't quite dovetail with the story I've heard about them shooting the elephant's foot with a gun to spall off a sample. I think there's still some damage control in some of the stories.
Which is to say, lies.