In the middle of it all, it buried tons of various radioactive elements, including more than 100 drums of plutonium, which has a radioactive half-life of 24,100 years.
Into unlined trenches a few hundred feet above the aquifer, it dumped metals like beryllium, cadmium, chromium, nickel and 281,000 pounds of lead. Into open pits near the Pueblo of Isleta, Sandia dumped carcinogenic solvents such as tetrachloroethylene (PCE), trichloroethelyene (TCE) and dichlorodifluorometh ane (CFC-12). The dump opened in 1959 and for nearly 30 years, until it closed in 1988, received as much as 1.5 million cubic feet of radioactive and toxic material.
#REACTOR MELTDOWN SITE CROSSWORD FULL#
Instead the NRC allowed Sandia to bury dozens of radioactive canisters full of meltdown material in vertical holes drilled into shallow, unlined trenches in its 2.6-acre Sandia Mixed Waste Landfill (MWL). The only safe storage option for such wastes would have been in a specially engineered facility, but no such option existed at the time. These were real nuclear meltdowns that produced dangerous nuclear wastes.
Nuclear reactors worldwide reprogrammed their computers based on these codes. The experiments contributed to the creation of fail-safe computer codes based on various worst-case scenarios. They collected data from these meltdowns, while high-speed cameras recorded the progress. So commercial nuclear plants all over the world sent enriched uranium to Sandia, where scientists triggered dozens of nuclear meltdowns by irradiating the fuel at temperatures greater than 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit in its Annular Core Research Reactor. The NRC asked Albuquerque’s Sandia National Laboratories to answer this question. What were the threats to nuclear safety, and how could we plan for them? The meltdown raised alarm at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission about the risk of meltdown at other nuclear reactors. In March of 1979, mechanical failure and human error contributed to a reactor meltdown at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear plant.
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