Yesterday's News Today or Back In My Day
It was the summer of 1988.I'd just completed my junior year of college at a small liberal arts college in Helena, Montana. That spring I'd discovered the field of statistics and decided that was going to be my major. Since the aforementioned college did not offer a degree in statistics (or a Bachelors of Science in anything) I decided to take advantage of having my tuition and fees paid at the University of Washington and transfer there for my final undergrad year.
However, for the summer I'd managed to get a summer internship with the Department of Energy, working at Battelle Labs in Richland, Washington. Richland, Pasco, & Kennewick (or the Tri-Cities as they're typically known) are cities because of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The Hanford Nuclear Reservation existed to produce plutonium for America's atomic weapons. Forty years of producing plutonium meant that Hanford had a large amount of nuclear waste (53 million US gallons of liquid waste plus 25 million cubic feet of solid waste) and Battelle had a contract to figure out what to do with it. [To put those amounts into context, that's over 80 Olympic size pools of liquid waste and solid waste covering a US football field to a depth of 434 feet]. Because I had statistical experience (all of 1 semester) I was assigned to work with a gentleman whose primary job was to help determine the set up for an experiment that would identify a mixture of components (including liquid nuclear waste) which could be made into a glass that would have the optimal leaching characteristics. More specifically, even if the glass was exposed to the groundwater, the radiation wouldn't enter said groundwater. That said, I didn't work on that. I programmed stastical routines in FORTRAN. Most excitingly for me was the fact that since I'd never programmed in FORTRAN, I got to learn on the fly. Because I learned via trial and error, which involved submitting code to the mainframe and seeing what I got back, I managed to run up a computational bill of tens of thousands of dollars. Of course, just as I was done they got FORTRAN on a personal computer, which eliminated the need to run it on the mainframe.
The key point is that in 1988 they were hard at work determining what the glass to contain this radioactive waste should be made of and I was there. So I was quite entertained to read a news article about the plant that's being built to actually do the process I learned about 23 years ago. The plant is behind schedule and over budget. It's currently expected to start churning out the glass logs containing radioactive waste in 2019, which will make it over thirty years to go from testing to production.
By the way, the B Reactor, which was the first large scale nuclear reactor ever built and the genesis for all that nuclear waste? It went from ground breaking in October of 1943 to nuclear citicality in September of 1944. That's eleven months.
However, for the summer I'd managed to get a summer internship with the Department of Energy, working at Battelle Labs in Richland, Washington. Richland, Pasco, & Kennewick (or the Tri-Cities as they're typically known) are cities because of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The Hanford Nuclear Reservation existed to produce plutonium for America's atomic weapons. Forty years of producing plutonium meant that Hanford had a large amount of nuclear waste (53 million US gallons of liquid waste plus 25 million cubic feet of solid waste) and Battelle had a contract to figure out what to do with it. [To put those amounts into context, that's over 80 Olympic size pools of liquid waste and solid waste covering a US football field to a depth of 434 feet]. Because I had statistical experience (all of 1 semester) I was assigned to work with a gentleman whose primary job was to help determine the set up for an experiment that would identify a mixture of components (including liquid nuclear waste) which could be made into a glass that would have the optimal leaching characteristics. More specifically, even if the glass was exposed to the groundwater, the radiation wouldn't enter said groundwater. That said, I didn't work on that. I programmed stastical routines in FORTRAN. Most excitingly for me was the fact that since I'd never programmed in FORTRAN, I got to learn on the fly. Because I learned via trial and error, which involved submitting code to the mainframe and seeing what I got back, I managed to run up a computational bill of tens of thousands of dollars. Of course, just as I was done they got FORTRAN on a personal computer, which eliminated the need to run it on the mainframe.
The key point is that in 1988 they were hard at work determining what the glass to contain this radioactive waste should be made of and I was there. So I was quite entertained to read a news article about the plant that's being built to actually do the process I learned about 23 years ago. The plant is behind schedule and over budget. It's currently expected to start churning out the glass logs containing radioactive waste in 2019, which will make it over thirty years to go from testing to production.
By the way, the B Reactor, which was the first large scale nuclear reactor ever built and the genesis for all that nuclear waste? It went from ground breaking in October of 1943 to nuclear citicality in September of 1944. That's eleven months.