The CEMRC Lie

Figure 1. This brave soul is about to endure 30 minutes bathed only in his own radiation.

What is the most extreme example of using LNT and ALARA to rip off the US taxpayer? There are many worthy contenders for this prize. But while it may not be the most expensive, it is my great honor to nominate the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). WIPP is a deep geologic repository for defense department radioactive waste. Most of the WIPP waste is alpha emitting, heavy metals that can be contact handled, meaning moved around with no special shielding at all, meaning they could be put in a warehouse. Or much more accurately, they could stay in the same warehouse whence they came. But WIPP is located in a salt formation 655 meters below the desert about 30 miles from Carlsbad, New Mexico. The original projected Life Cycle Cost was 11 billion dollars.

I admit 11 billion is not a lot in the radiation protection racket. The Hanford Clean Up Program is projected to cost something like a half a trillion dollars. I agree that’s an impressive number for moving contaminated dirt from one place to another. But I would argue that style counts in this award.

The reason why WIPP wins in the style category is CEMRC, the Carlsbad Environmental Monitoring and Research Center. To reassure the public about WIPP’s safety, the Department of Energy came up with CEMRC. The goal of CEMRC is not to measure dose rates in milli-sieverts or even micro-sieverts or even nano-sieverts per hour. The goal is to push detection limits down to levels never before achieved. CEMRC has a Whole Body Counter capable of detecting whole body counts by isotope down to a few decays per second. Ladies and gentlemen, we are talking pico-Sieverts per hour or pSv/h for the typing challenged.

To do this you must exclude background radiation which is over 10,000 decays per second. So the Whole Body Counter is a cube 8 feet on a side, whose walls are made of 10 inch thick pre-WW II cast iron. Volunteers in the Lie Down and Be Counted program lie on a bed in the cube for 30 minutes once a year to find out how radioactive they are. They get to choose the music that’s piped in.

Over 500 locals have participated in the widely publicized program. The public rationale for CEMRC is that by comparing the pre-WIPP levels with post-WIPP number we can convince everybody that nothing bad is happening. And indeed so far there have been no significant changes in whole body or lung counts. But the numbers CEMRC is looking for are so small that the measurements had to be corrected for minuscule amounts of Cobalt-60 in the cube walls and thorium in some of the detectors. Of course, the program also sensitized people to extremely low levels of radioactivity, levels 1000’s of times below background. If these levels are worrisome enough to be measured at great cost, what happens when we have a real release?

We found out in February, 2014. One of the stored barrels caught fire, burst the lid, and released some plutonium and americium. The contents of this barrel contained both nitrate salts (strong oxidizers) and some metal, an unstable mixture that can react, produce heat, and generate gas. Usually this material is diluted with inorganic kitty litter to keep the reaction under control. But for some reason wheat based litter was used instead which just added fuel to the fire.¹ Wonder what the PRA probability of this screw up is?

The leak was quickly detected by the monitoring system which automatically switched the ventilation to filtration mode, pushing the exhaust through HEPA filters. As a result, the release into the environment was measured in micro-becquerels per cubic meter, a million times less than the extremely conservative EPA levels requiring action.

But this non-event generated nation wide publicity, shut WIPP down for three years, and resulted in 500 million dollars of expenditures, plus a 74 million dollar settlement to New Mexico. The settlement is a clear admission that the community has somehow been harmed. The press release accompanying the settlement does not say how. It’s other people’s money. We don’t need real accounting.

By fiat, WIPP must now operate in full filtration mode all the time, hampering ventilation of the facility, despite the fact the unfiltered air would put out the same amount of Am-241 per year as is in a single household smoke detector.

I’m not completely sure CEMRC is just more bureaucratic stupidity. How do you justify putting stuff that you would have to swallow in order for it to do you any harm, stuff that is roughly as dangerous as lead, 655 meters underground at immense cost? If I were given that job I would emphasize how hard it is to stop “radiation”. A cleverly named program employing a highly publicized 8 foot cube that looks like a bank vault would do very nicely.

The other thing I must do is completely obscure the huge, qualitative differences between photon energy and electron/alpha particle energy. A photon is a massless, uncharged packet of energy that can zap right through a person. Alphas and electrons are massy, charged particles that have little or no penetrating power. I must never, ever mention that the stuff the bank vault is stopping is not the stuff I’m putting in the repository. CEMRC sends a message loud and clear. Radiation is extremely penetrating. For most of the stuff that is being packed into WIPP, CEMRC’s message is a lie.

1. The barrel was packed at the Los Alamos National Lab. This was an all New Mexico screw up.