October 25, 2000
'Blue glow' reported at Paducah plant
Memo says nuclear reactions may have occurred in pit
http://www.courier-journal.com/localnews/2000/0010/25/001025blue.html
By JAMES MALONE, The Courier-Journal

The area in the circle is where workers at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant reported seeing a "blue glow" in the 1980s and '90s, according to an internal memo written by Ray Carroll, a health physicist for the U.S. Enrichment Corp., and obtained by The Courier-Journal.

BY MICHAEL CLEVENGER,
THE COURIER-JOURNAL

PADUCAH, Ky. -- A "blue glow" reported by workers at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant could indicate nuclear reactions occurred underground in a top-secret burial pit for atomic-weapons parts, according to an internal memo obtained by The Courier-Journal.

The memo, written Thursday by a health physicist employed by the plant operator, says "a 'blue glow' that looked like 'blue fire' above the ground" was first observed in the early 1980s over the southwest corner of the C-746-F classified burial yard and was reportedly seen a number of times after that.

Ray Carroll, a health physicist for the U.S. Enrichment Corp., wrote that the "blue glow" could be a type of radiation resulting from nuclear fission processes, and added, "If the cause is a fission source, personnel entering the area could potentially receive a lethal dose of radiation."

But the U.S. Department of Energy's site manager at Paducah, Don Seaborg, said yesterday, "We don't have any indication" that a fission reaction occurred. He said that after receiving the memo last week, he had not been able to find supporting data, such as elevated radiation readings on the landfill's surface or worker exposure measurements.

"That's the concern, if you have a blue glow, then that's indicative of a criticality and of course a major safety concern," Seaborg said. "My background experience tells me that it was unlikely something was going on of a criticality (nuclear reaction) nature. I'm bringing in the right people with the right certifications to verify that."

The plant has been in the news since August 1999 when three employees filed a whistleblower lawsuit alleging that contamination and conditions were much worse than had been disclosed by former operators. A cleanup effort is underway.

The Energy Department leases production facilities to the U.S. Enrichment Corp., a publicly traded company, but still owns the burial pit and other areas where radioactive and hazardous waste was dumped or stored during a half-century of enriching uranium for weapons and power plants.

According to the memo, the burial yard was covered with five to nine feet of dirt at an undisclosed time after the first observations of a "blue glow." But it notes that there was another reported sighting in 1996, long after the earthen cover was applied. The glow has only been seen immediately after a heavy rain, when there was a mist or moisture in the air, the memo said. Carroll wrote that the glow could be Cerenkov radiation, a phenomenon in which charged radioactive particles from a fission reaction give off a blue glow in water.

On the chance that a fission reaction is occurring, Carroll recommended barring employees from within 1,000 feet of the site and installing a continuous radiation monitor with an audible alarm and "a red warning light that can easily be read from a distance."

Carroll also recommended taking core samples in the burial yard to determine if radioactive products of fission are present. "If these radio-isotopes are present, a much more extensive environmental remediation of the whole area will be required," he wrote.

But GeorgAnn Lookofsky, a USEC spokeswoman, said yesterday that Carroll's safety recommendations had not been put into effect, because in radiation surveys of the area, "we haven't found anything to raise our concerns."

She said Carroll wrote the memo after a plant employee raised concerns about the glow.

There could be other explanations for the glow, according to Kimberlee J. Kearfott, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan.

For the glow to be from a fission reaction, there would have to be "extremely large sources" and a vast amount of energy being expended to cause the Cerenkov effect, she said yesterday. She said the only places she has seen the blue glow are in a university research reactor under water or in spent fuel rods immersed in water.

She said a more likely scenario is either a chemical fluorescence or phosphorescence or a glow from tritium -- a radioactive material that reports say was buried in unknown quantities in the plant's landfills.

Seaborg, the Energy Department site manager, raised the possibility that the glow was the result of something going on underground, possibly from spontaneously burning metals, such as uranium or aluminum. The reports of a glow, however, do not mention any smoke accompanying the blue effervescence.

A metals fire also could release radioactivity, but on a much smaller scale than from a fission reaction, Seaborg said.

John Volpe, manager of the Radiation Control and Toxic Agents Branch of the Kentucky Cabinet for Health Services, said he does not have enough information about the incidents to even speculate as to what may have happened. But Volpe said this is an example of why the Energy Department should make available information about the landfill's contents.

"We have asked them to take samples and basically they said they would not," Volpe said.

Robert Daniel, director of the Kentucky Division of Waste Management, the state regulatory agency overseeing the Paducah cleanup, said the report of a blue glow "is news to me." Daniel said he will ask his staff to review the matter but added that the Energy Department in the past has gone to court to successfully prohibit the state from regulating disposal of nuclear material inside the plant's fence.

According to Bechtel Jacobs, the Energy Department's environmental cleanup contractor at the Paducah plant, the landfill was used from 1965 to '87 for burial of classified weapons components contaminated with radioactive isotopes. Many of the weapons were sent from the Pantex atomic bomb plant in Texas.

Energy Department records show that the Paducah plant received several hundred tons of weapons parts to be dismantled so that precious metals could be recovered.

Apparently by mistake, 20 radioactive atomic bomb neutron generators containing tritium also were shipped to the plant in the 1960s. Very likely other unrecognized shipments of radioactive materials were in the weaponry the Paducah plant was asked to dismantle, because the shipments were not scanned, Energy Department records show.

Tom Clements, executive director of the Nuclear Control Institute, a Washington, D.C., nuclear non-proliferation group, said if a fission reaction is confirmed, "it is most troubling." Clements said if such a reaction had occurred, "a remediation plan needs to be developed immediately."

Earlier this month, the Energy Department released a series of maps it had prepared a year ago but never made public that showed that radioactive contamination had leaked into the environment around the plant at distances greater than a mile.

  This is a prime example of an underground criticality accident at a gas diffusion plant.  Gas diffusion processes can have slow cooking criticalities in the process from deposits plus UF-6.In dismantlement slow cookers can happen if water leaks into systems.  In losses to the atmopshere the enriched uranium can run into drain pipes, which are not safe geometries, cause these concrete joints leak and there are always voids around these pipes in the ground.

 Criticalities can happen in around gas diffusion plants.In criticalities the enegy release can excite the air molecules and make for radiation excited blue glows, that are unmistakable signs of a nuclear accident.These accidents will also releases very dangerous gas of xenon and krypton isotopes that can become internalized Sr-90 or Cs-137.

Criticalities in the ground or with water involved also make hydrogen, which tends to rise out of the burial grounds and can ignite and produce a column of fire effect.  At the Y-12's plant classified burial ground, which has enriched material burried, a column of fire effect was observed in the 80's by guards on patrol on Chestnut Ridge Road.  Usually, all the air ionization and toxic emission effects will affect things like pine trees near these nuclear emission active areas and cause them to die as indicators of emissions.

 If your standing near one of these blue glows--------you'll die in weeks-----at greater ranges you'll become mysteriously sick-----parly via inhaling nuclear gases that internalize and part from direct irradiation.

 Gas Diffusion plants often left their criticality systems turned off in the 80's, and workers never were warned if these criticalities happened.

Subj:  Re: 'Blue glow' reported at Paducah plant----> Nuke criticality observed
Date:  10/25/00 10:05:17 AM Eastern Daylight Time
 
 Sounds like a criticality accident to me. I was in charge of Nuclear
Criticality safety at the Navy's Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory for twenty
years, and that's what criticality accidents look like

John P. Shannon