Inspectors find safety problems at nuclear weapons complex

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/67375.html


Contractors at one of the nation's major nuclear weapons complexes repeatedly used substandard construction materials and components that could've caused a major radioactive spill, a recently completed internal government probe has found.

One of the materials used at the Savannah River Site on the South Carolina-Georgia border failed to meet federal safety standards and "could have resulted in a spill of up to 15,000 gallons of high-level radioactive waste," the Energy Department's inspector general found.

The inspector general's five-month investigation also found that contractors bought 9,500 tons of substandard steel reinforcing bars for the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C.

The faulty steel was discovered after a piece of it broke during the construction of a facility to convert spent nuclear weapons-grade plutonium and uranium into mixed-oxide, or MOX, fuel for civilian reactors.

Replacing 14 tons of substandard rebar — the steel bars commonly used to reinforce concrete — that already had been installed cost $680,000 and delayed the completion of the $4.8 billion MOX facility, the investigation found.

Among the other questionable components the probe found were piping, steel plates, an unusable $12 million "glovebox" used to handle radioactive materials, furnace module doors and robots that are used to avoid human exposure to radiological and chemical materials.

-long snip-

Environmental Management agrees that current practices can and should be enhanced to provide greater federal and contractor oversight," Triay wrote.
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I would hope a lot more then just "enhanced".

no more nuke weapons or nuke plants

Anyway...there is no nuclear in my neighborhood..so what's with all this negative.
:sarcasm:


Tikki