A Brief History of: Sequoyah Fuels corporation Radiation Event (Documentary)
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- Опубліковано 25 сер 2024
- #nuclear #history #documentary
Learn while you're at home with Plainly Difficult
On January 4, 1986 the same year as the Chernobyl disaster, Sequoyah Fuels Corporation in Gore, Oklahoma, experienced a rupture of a storage tank which took the life of a 26-year-old worker and hospitalised of 37 of the 42 onsite workers.
The event would release 29500 lbs of Radioactive material into the atmosphere.
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I always look forward to your videos!
As usual good saturday afternoon.
I know I said it before, but I hope you make videos on the 1990's british BSE-scandal, the Runit dome and Semipalatinsk.
if your seeing this i hope you have a great day!
Thank you!
@@just_because_ It's a British thing, I'm guessing? The whole "class" thing is less common in the US.
Hi plainly difficult, thanks for the vids - they're very interesting!
I would like to see you make one on the Levant man-engine disaster of 1919, I know that there's not a lot of material in it for a very long vid, but perhaps just a quick one?
Thanks!
You don't have to be a nuclear scientist to know that heating a sealed container is a very bad idea.
Heating a sealed container with no pressure monitoring system and no overpressure release is a bad idea.
Even your average pressure-cooking pot has both of these features for a good reason.
@@diesistkeinname795 Apparent;y no IQ test was required for employment or training/reading manuals after hire..
Heating a sealed pressure vessel at work rn. Luckily its a 3000psi autoclave and autogenous pressure is like 2 psi lol
@@Live.Vibe.Lasers I suppose you're also dealing with lower amounts of less dangerous materials
What's more disturbing is the nature of this gas to become a liquid when heated.
"Oh my god this is a PR disaster, what are we gonna do?"
"Boss, a nuclear plant called "Chernobyl" just blew up"
"Oh thank god"
It is not possible for a RBMK to blow up!
Yea good one
SAD BUT THAT COULD BE TRUE.
It's like when your New Deal stuff isn't really working and then the Empire of Japan attacks.
@@veretos7 when I had my thyroid scan, the first thing they had to do was get my baseline radiation level as measured by the gamma camera.
During conversation with the radiologist, she confirmed that my generation does indeed have an elevated gamma emission level.
I was born a week after Tsar Bomba was detonated.
Nobody of my generation can figure out why cancer rates went way up...
Downside is, when I get angry, really bad things happen, as I turn into the Phenomenal Bulk.
Never thought i would hear anything like "luckily, in a few months Chernobyl would happen"
Actually, that's how I finish ever conversation related ty paternal aunt's birth.
I know, right!? 💀💀💀
As soon as he said 1986, I was thinking that was a particularly bad year.
yeah bad year. definitely don't drink the wine from THAT year!
Oh yeah, '86 was the worst year this side of 2016! There was this mess, then Chernobyl, I skipped a grade and got bullied to hell and back, we got to watch Challenger blowing up live at school, my mum had to have risky brain surgery, (she's fine now!), Metallica's Cliff Burton was killed in a bus crash, and my sister started school and became an even bigger pain in the @ss... '86 sucked! XP
heating an overfilled, pressurized vessel without any way to directly monitor the inside temperature is just negligent, especially when its filled with something called Uranium-hex a-flouride
It's Darwin Award level stupid.
But then, people who agree to work in a nuclear reprocessing plant in the '80s probably aren't the full ticket to start with.
@@jamesharmer9293 Nah, most places were and are safe. If you're a working class guy, it's a lot safer than some other options. Oil fields and mining to name a couple.
@@gamemeister27 ball turret gunner in Europe in the early 1940s is a hazardous affair so I’ve heard
Don't forget that the operator that moved the overfilled tank into the steam cabinet was the same operator that didn't position the tank on a scale correctly.
Yeah, I mean, an an unmonitored vat of Uranium hexaflouride, what could possibly go wrong?
Oh boy. I heard shift change. We all know where this is going.
Yeah. Shift change is when the fun starts!
More than one shift change at that...
Strangely enough, multiple shifts did not seem to lead to miscommunication or loss of vital information.
The operator who found the problem and began releaving pressure was a good attentive employee, together with his supervisor who gave correct instructions.
The subsequent shift, where the same worker who positioned the cart incorrectly was on duty, was the one who blew the vessel
@@neuralmute That, and when Mr. Labcoat shows up with a clipboard...
Yep. South, that's where this is going.
Can I just say? Good on that one operator for recognizing the severe nature of the problem and taking what steps he could to mitigate damage. Alerting his supervisor, helping remove what could be removed... Props.
I'm thinking about some of my coworkers. They'd check the time, realize their shift was almost over and leave it for the next person to deal with.
@@christopherconard2831 So true
And then he handed it over to the dummy who caused the problem. I hope our night shift hero had the wisdom to go straight home, pack up his family, and get out of town for a day or two.
I've always wondered what "props" meant. I know it means something along the lines of "fair play to the dude" but I don't know the specific meaning
@@rubievale I believe it’s an abbreviation of “proper respect”
"the system is controlled by a person on site, and there are no automatic safety controls"... When dealing with things this toxic this doesn't make me feel better.
Think about the aditional hazard pay!
Now you feel a little better, right?
@@astroboy3291 not when u have to work with HF
This shit is nasty
"the company did not have an emergency reaction plan"? We are working on one of the most nasty chemicals on the planet without any plan or contact with the local medical center (as shown by the hospital not having any equipment to deal with exposure)... How the heck didn't they get sued.
@@NoShotTwoKill true that, but I only wanted to make a morbid joke.
Father of one of my best friends died because of a asbestos damadged lung.
Back in the 70's they didn't give shit about worker safty.
@@astroboy3291 They don’t give a shit about safety in most of the us states even today
Barely anything changed
So they didn't have a planned procedure for something as obvious as overfilling?
Guess the early days of underestimating expansive substances hit the nuclear industry too... Liquefied gas (propane, etc) and even gasoline expansion hit railroad cars and other storage vessels in their early life before a few explosions changed practices.
Makes you wonder what is un discovered :)
@@volvo09 tbf, most substances aren't damn near impossible to handle and changing states in the process but their solution to reheat the barrel was incredibly dumb, instead of setting the thing aside for more level heads to fix
@@AsbestosMuffins The question I have is what would those level heads be able to do in a case like that? Granted, it should have never got to this point in the first place, but the over filling happened and had to be dealt with somehow.
@@Nareimooncatt you wait till it fully solidifies, split the cylinder, and feed the mass into the previous process stage slowly. It can then be refilled into new containers but would cost the company a days worth of production.
@@volvo09 Sad fact of safety, many issues are only properly appreciated when somthing goes disastrously wrong. Although to be fair the phenomenon isn't restricted to just safety, wars tend to have similar national culture level effects
The closest experience I had to uranium hexafloride was driving on the road seeing a large tank with an alarming amount of warnings on it (explosive, acidic, radioactive, poisonous) and the only thing that gave it away was the transport number (un 2977).
Definitely slightly concerning on your daily commute.
I remember once seeing a train go by my hometown, rather unusual. Single locomotive, several boxcars, and a caboose, long after they stopped being regularly used. Then I noticed that the reporting marks on all the cars and caboose was DODX. X at the end of a reporting mark means a non-railroad owner, and clearly DOD is Department of Defense. Some kind of special or secret stuff in there, and a caboose full of people with guns to make sure it stays secret.
Ah, "sparsely populated residential areas." That would explain why it was buried so easily.
Well. That and Big Brother Chernobyl throwing it's own block party a few months later.
Lmao Chernobyl block party.... OMG brilliant
Chernobyl released like 50 million curies, and this one just 3. Party was 16,7 million times bigger
@@alexeyf1795 Hell of a block party! It was pretty... rad.
😃
@@luvondarox You kidding? That party was just on fire!
And, of course, just a few *weeks* later, the US headlines being dominated by the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger...
Kinda surprised you didn't note that the plant was literally right next to the I40 bridge that collapsed in 2002. Both disasters you've done in Oklahoma and they are within a stones throw of each other.
I’m not an expert in geology, but when they said, “This tank is way too full as a solid, let’s turn it into a gas,” I raised my eyebrows.
@@tripplefives1402 no it's theater
@@PyrrhusBrin ok that was hilarious!
The process of going from Yellow Cake to UF6 is not that simple, so we shall look into it a bit
Goes through one of the most complex yet comprehensive chemical reactions I’ve heard of outside of school. Wow. You truly do fantastic research on each video you do, thanks for this!!!
Wuh oh. The corrosiveness isn't even the worst part of hydrofluoric acid exposure. Something about its chemical makeup can send you into cardiac arrest.
Thank you!
That's the problem, you hear the word acid and you think skin burns and that's it. Anyone who works in a chem lab has probably gotten an acid burn at least once. I managed to burn my finger prints off the first week I started working using acetic acid that ran down a pipette while i was neutralizing a solution. I figured it's just vinegar - wrong. The problem with HF is one exposure might be your last. By the time you see a skin burn it has already been absorbed into your blood stream and is attacking all the calcium in your body.
@@scottyV1000 Yup. With most acids, you splash a little on yourself, even if it's strong, you're totally fine. Wash that shit off and it won't even get through the dead skin. HF?maybe not!
@@gamemeister27 Nitric leaves brown stains on your hands but doesn't burn you very fast. You can put your hand in some strong acids as long as it isn't wet as the acid reacts with the water.
I worked in a semiconductor lab that used a lot of HF. The worst accident I witnessed involved a woman drop a pen in a shallow etching container filled with about two liters of the stuff and without thinking she reached into it to retrieve her pen. Her glove was not designed to withstand that exposure, it was to be used under the correct glove. It failed and her index finger was covered in HF. We rushed her to the ER and the doctor on call immediately upon being told what she was exposed to injected calcium paste under her fingernail. She made a full recovery without losing her finger. I was the one who drove her for treatment and so I was in the area off to the side while all of that happened. I have never heard a human shreak like that in my entire life. It's been over twenty years but every time I think about it it makes my skin crawl. If you ever have to work with that stuff please be extremely careful. I've seen it eat chrome off of a screwdriver during a demonstration. HF is no joke.
YES!! a new Plainly Difficult! Saturdays just wouldn't be the same without. thanks John for all your hard work - always very much appreciated. NICE ONE!
Couldnt agree more. You do your presentations to an exceptional level without any bs
It’s great that you just don’t give gory details about the accidents alone, but also give much background info, that explains why accidents may happen and also adds knowledge to us watchers.
PS. Watching a few flight channels I notice that accidents have a nasty habit to occur when there’s no emergency plans, when corners are cut and when arising problems or symptoms are dismissed. But when preparations are made for worst case scenarios, when there’s a plan B and maybe a plan C and when people are communicating, the results seldom are to be not that serious. So why don’t people ever learn?!
Too much work
To me this is almost incredible. I have been working with automatic/semi automatic fill by weight systems since the early 80's. Such things as concrete/asphalt mixing, grain bags, pails of paint, solvents, cooking oil etc. I always design in a 'Tare check" (empty container weight) procedure before every container. It prevents filling if - no container, incorrect container, partially filled container. It is a common practice and safeguard even on mundane, harmless products if for no other reason than to save clean up costs. A tare weight check procedure, even if used on a manual system, would have prevented the incident. Even the technology of the mid 80's was well capable of doing so. I live in Canada and generally we have tighter industrial safety standards and proceedural compliance than I have observed in the USA
and most of these procedures (and the safety culture that follows) vary from state/province/canton. I worked for the same company in two provinces and it was like working in Belgium....................and some Eastern Bloc craphole.
Holy cow, my grandpa worked for Kerr-McGee for over two decades as a carpenter and handyman! How unexpected to see a video topic based in Oklahoma, where I live! 😀
My dad, gpa, and uncle worked as pipe fitters for a Kerr-McGee facility in Death Valley in 1977. Not for long but I remember living in the tiny town of Trona for about a year.
As an Arkansan I’m quite entertained by his pronunciations of town Names. Like vian
They were in to EVRYTHING for a few years.
Oil, gas, nuke, had a chain of gas stations, & did mining.
They were merged out of existence some time in the early 2000's I think.
Kind of a shame.
I know Silkwood and this overshadow everything else but they were an innovative company that came up with a lot of new technologies.
Born-n-raised and never heard about this one. Only the of course famous Silkwood incident, and only because that one was made a movie. Hush hush
Loved the breakdown of the UF6 refinery process. Really enjoy the science behind why and what went wrong + anything nuclear so appreciate the effort that goes in for that!
can you do an educational video explaining measurement units of radiation? they're so confusing... 😲
💡 and maybe some history of why there are so many would be super interesting
Isn't it to do with different country standards
Curies, gray, roentgen, rads, sieverts, rems, plainly's favorite petabecuels(sp?)
Radiation isn’t just one thing, you have rates, total amounts, etc etc
@@brucebaxter6923 right, and it'd be great to see all those laid out and differentiated
nothing warms my heart like a radiation accident
What about a radioactive acid incident?
Just watch out for that blue light.
a, yes, the famous [location] [dangerous affect] incident.
but great video, as always.
Yes, the one that caused [number] fatalities.
As such I'm going to place it here on my disaster scale: (a random number based on... Well, nothing really except I'm a UA-camr and you're watching this video. So it makes sense, right?)
Yay!!!! Finally talking about Kerr-McGee!!! Ive been to all these old facilities most are still ongoing super fund projects.
Those stories and actors need to be remembered. Only they are history and not stories as such.
The Hanford Site in Washingtin is worth visiting, LIGO, a Japanese internment camp and even german POWs are part of the areas story. Venture further and find the Navy's scrapped ship nuclear generators in forever graves. And so much more, the tank waste story is more a boondoggle than science.
Are they being cleaned up currently ?
Yes they are.
Yes, The demolished facilities and underground/above ground tanks we’re both dumped into a concrete lined hole alongside drums of toxic/ mildly radioactive/contaminated fluids
capped with concrete and buried. The result is a giant mound north of town shadowed by endless 500,000 barrel oil storage tanks.
Is constantly has environmental contractors working out there and is monitored by the NRC.
6:18 there he is again, Lab Coat Guy. Always suspect. Also, at 10:22, when a Ford Pinto enters a disaster scene you need to start running.
A Ford Pinto IS a disaster scene all on its own.
Edit: I have actually worked for Ford, in quality control for part of that time. I could probably make some extremely boring videos about why the North American car industry is itself a disaster. But the Pinto is one of the scarier bits.
Awww... the Pinto wasn't THAT terrible... Seriously. The actual dumpster fires of cars were the fox body mustangs equipped with the 3.8L V6 (1983-1987) before the general public performed enough R+D for the company.
The Pinto was supposed to be a semi-disposable vehicle, that would fill a niche during the gas crisis in the US. They are actually a durable chassis with ONE fluke wiring snafu on ONE production year. What can also be rather humorous is dropping a 289 or 302 into one and then ROFL-stomping other V8 rods on the drag strip...
Ugly as the south end of a north bound mule? Yup. Bad rap for one plausible but quite unlikely event? Yup. Bad car? Not really...
@@nunyabidness674 MY older borther once took a couple of wrecked Chevy Vegas, cut them in two and made one good one, then put a nice big V8 in it, I forget what engine exactly, and he would crush people at stoplights. Much fun.
"Hey everyone, I named my nuclear fuels company after the Cherokee native that created a writing system for his people. I think he would be very proud of what we've accomplished here."
They could have called it "Painted rock tied to stick" and it would have been more modern.
I’m pretty sure it’s named after the county the plant was in.
It's named after the county it's in lmao. Sequoyah county by the way,...Home of....Sequoyah!
John, you have the gift of explaining complex operations and theories in such a way that simpletons such as myself can actually understand the event featured, bless you Sir and thank you!!!🙏👍😷
Thank you!
I never thought I would hear the phrase "Luckily... Chernobyl would happen".
I appreciate the Closed Captions too
I lived in Tulsa at the time and I never heard of this incident. Kerr McGee was more known for the Karen Silkwood incident about 12 years before.
Them poor workers! HF is no joke
Scary shit.
Elemental “Fluorine”. Fluoride is an anion of Fluorine. Now I hate myself for being that guy.
add a tri in there an we have a real party with some UF6 ontop of it all ^.^
Some fluoride compounds are very stable such a PTFE (Teflon) but you never want to burn anything with fluorine in it because HF is usually one of the combustion products. I used to do C,H, N analyses where you burn the sample in pure oxygen and measure the combustion gasses. Quartz tubes are used in the furnace and every time someone would give me a sample with fluorine in it I had to replace the tubes because the resulting HF would eat through the tubes.
Thank you for running a fundraiser for OCD specifically. I have it, and a lot of people and certainly the media don't realize how intensely pervasive it is 24/7 and how much it sucks.
Woot woot! I'm excited, terrified, and sympathetic!!!
@@smoke420chillandromeda8 bouta be
Thank you for covering this, John. My mother wanted me to work at that site but I knew enough about the Kerr-McGee corporation to want to have nothing to do with them especially not in a with radiation involved.
You should talk about the Kerr McGee Thorium incident in West Chicago, IL in the US. It's a super interesting story about how a company was literally giving radioactive waste for its employees to use as dirt filler and the subsequent cleanup efforts, the story spans from 1931 through 2015. It took 16,000 rail cars to get rid of all the waste
"... he's inhaled hydrofluoric acid."
Me: Oop. He's done like dinner.
Yep, time to bathe in a tub full of calgonate
Here's the thing about hydrofluoric acid: Even if the burns don't kill you, it very quickly dissolves into your entire body, ripping electrons off everything it comes into contact with.
That's what ensures you are toast. There's no getting up from HF.
@@sandordugalin8951 It’s highly Electronegative.
I feel like this happening in Oklahoma had a big part in not being a big news story
True- it would have been a local story for me since I lived in Tulsa at the time. Never heard of it. However Kerr McGee was more known for the Karen Silkwood incident in 1974.
Silkwood account
www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interact/silkwood.html
My grandparents lived very close to that processing center. It's surreal hearing all the names of the towns and police departments again. People down there haven't forgot about Karen Silkwood.
You can still drive by and see the condemned school.
It's a shame. The second operator actually caught the problem.
I live an hour (give/take a bit) from where this happened and this is the first time I've heard of it and this is a very detailed and informative video massive thanks! I've been watching several videos like this collecting the stories and details from events around the world that weren't taught in school to pass on to my son
i think "Radiational" is missspeled as "Radiationl" in the title.
He clearly meant to write Radiationl
@@devynlewis8167 Maybe, but "radiational" is a good word. We need to find ways to use it.
@@RCAvhstape I think it has potential in comic songs to the tune Modern Major General.
Maybe it’s supposed to be “Radiation! Accident (documentary)”
@Tano Please, tell me more about this large-size radiation...
Proper bread and butter Plainly vid, nicely done dude!
Uranium hexaflouride sounds like a great parting supply. Jesh. That’s a scary word
Wow I had never heard of this one.
I thought I was fairly well read up on Kerr-McGee.
It is hard to keep track of all the 80's nuclear incidents.
Look up fluoride chemistry sometime and prepare to be horrified
ClF3
"ive always recommended a good pair of running shoes" to be the ultimate MSDS ever...
I'm appalled that any lab or company that handles potentially dangerous materials or equipment wouldn't have emergency plans for any kind of problem. These guys were winging it.
Deregulation. That’s why.
Hydroflouric Acid is one that scares me most. If you spill it on yourself it won't burn at all. However, the reason it doesn't is because it soaks into your skin and then burns you from the inside out. It's nasty stuff.
You'll feel it, but it's a delayed sting. You then wash it and it subsides. Then 5 minutes later it stings again
So this site ending up belonging to General Atomics the folls who make the MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper (side project for them) . It was part of a long legal battle over whether it was better "encase in place" or "remove and remediate" that was settled earlier this year.
Which was chosen?
@@sc1338 basically remove and remediate. It has it's own risks but the encase in place potentially could contaminate the major river systems located near by
@@David-bf6bz yea, I found it on google maps. I wonder where they’re shipping the waste.
@@sc1338 probably the Andews site but maybe Barnwell based on the material
Not sure if you've done this one yet but it seems up your alley. That time Russia was making anthrax and a service crew forgot to replace a filter ....
Ahh yes, the totally, 100% "natural" Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak...
How about that time weaponized smallpox got out of another soviet lab and infected the surrounding town and a ship on the Aral sea?
6:40
5/8" are ~15.88mm not 9.53mm.
I only saw this because i memorized most important Inch to metric conversions.
Btw I love your Videos, it is very intresting to learn more about Industrial and nuclear disasters.
Fluorine compounds are definitely something you don't want to mess with. Fluorine gas is tremendously corrosive, hydrofluoric acid is strong enough to eat through glass, and it's even capable of bonding to noble gasses. But then you have polytetrafluoroethelyne, better known as Teflon, known for its lack of reactivity.
Never heard of this accident, thank you Plainly Difficult for another excellent episode!!!🙏👍😷
thank you for covering such interesting topics!
That's literally next to the bridge from the I 40 bridge collapse.
When he said Gore I was like no, then he said Vian and I was like fuck me. I live two hours away and never heard of this.
What made Three Mile Island Pennsylvania so deadly like Chernobyl was that there was a town built below the reactor which was completely wiped out by it like Chernobyl was completely wiped out by its reactor. The kicker in both was that the government covered it up along with the countless deaths and birth defects as a result of it.
Did any die or suffer injury at Three Mile Island?
The I-40 bridge disaster *and* Sequoyah Fuels? You've done two places that were right where I'm from :). If you want to chat about Sequoyah County / get help with pronunciations in Oklahoma, hit me up. Also worth researching is the Arkansas River lock and dam on Kerr Lake - it's had a few major incidents in my lifetime. The Tar Creek / Picher ("pitcher") site and the Karen Silkwood story are also interesting if you haven't covered them yet. All involve Kerr-McGee to some degree :).
I haven't yet watched the video, but hopefully you mention that the Cherokee Nation defied/fought the state of Oklahoma and cleaned up the site.
I finally did watch it, and my only comment (as a Vian High School graduate) is that the I is pronounced like “eye” ;).
Also my uncle in law would have been chief of Gore police at the time this happened. He’s unfortunately passed, but I’m sure there’s some untold story about the emergency response or lack thereof.
I'm so glad I dont work in a major (or any) chemical plant anymore.
I would really love it if you did an episode on Karen Silkwood. Would fit in nicely with your other radiation accident videos.
Kerr McGee was a legit phantom bad guy in the 70s.
always love how these photographs from these sits are terribly unlit to the point where you can't even tell what happened... huh.
To be fair your often looking at a photograph that was printed on a report that would later be scanned and compressed into a digital image so a lot of detail and resolution gets lost in the process.
@@centurion1945 ya that's true, that probably explains why these are all in black and white, at least the newer times
It’s funny, I was just reading about the Silverwood case, so to have it noted on the next video out is quite coincidental
I know absolutely nothing about making or storing UF6 but when they said they were gonna put the overfill tank into a steam chest....... are you serious?
It's called an autoclave in North America and is used to make this material change from solid to liquid for filling and emptying all the time. These are massive 12 ton cylinders so the autoclave is actually designed to fit them. They're not supposed to be overfilled though...lol
Thank you for doing these fantastic videos, I really appreciate your hard work and look forward to getting the notification when a new one is released.
At the 6:41 Mark you mentioned the box dimensions and I just wanted to let you know that 5/8" comes up as 15.88mm and the 9.53mm quoted is in fact 3/8".
I'm a former engineer and machinist and needed to have these conversions in my head all the time.
Once again, thank you for your fantastic videos and I hope that this comes across as intended rather than a criticism which I can assure you, it isn't.
"... and there is no automatic cut-off." (dramatic pause allows viewers to think to themselves "That seems like a bad idea.")
I love how you use a Ford Pinto as a vehicle
What better to represent disaster?
Where did you get all the cool super gritty black and white photos? Are those from an accident report or something?
It kinda looks like microfiche of a halftone photo like you would see in a newspaper.
Hey mate, great video! I have a topic suggestion- The Orica chemical plant in Newcastle, Australia. Had something like 3 major spills in the last decade. I had to stay indoors once because of Chromium Hexafluoride in the air, it was intense
Alright this is like the 4th extremely well done video..I subbed...you earned it. - Surry Virginia
Have you considered making a video on the 1977 Bohunice reactor accident? Very hard to find info on, but seems like something right up your alley.
If you speak Slovak, there is quite some information on this.
@@erikziak1249 that's good to know! I don't speak Slovak but knowing the material is out there is good. Thanks for the heads up!
You’d think corporations that deal with dangerous materials would pay just a little better attention to safety regulations considering how these types of products don’t discriminate and will kill anyone in the area, including executives. It’s baffling to me how stupid they can be.
This was in Oklahoma boss
Well, safety costs money, and they have a duty to their shareholders to maximize return on investment. Skimping on safety is profitable, at least in the short term. The strongest counter to this silly behavior was from a late Texas A&M professor in a US Chemical Safety Board documentary on the 2005 BP Texas City explosion: "If you think safety is expensive, try an accident."
I worked at a place where they introduced a form for unusual occurances that had not quite been accidents. I got to use the form once about business road travel.
The nuclear industry is a very safe industry. It has produced 20% of the US grid power for 70 years with very few incidents. This was a bad one, but they would have responded with many ways to depressurize those containers. Sometimes the plainly difficult guy goes over the remedies but here he did not.
I have lived in the area around this facility all my life and never knew this happened. My grandmother was actually the on-site nurse at the facility at one point, but I don't think she was there when this happened. From what I can tell, I think most of the facility has been buried because the site is almost entirely just massive piles of dirt where the buildings used to be. There's always some trucks parked there and bulldozers and excavators around it as well.
Anyway thanks for informing me of a hometown nuclear disaster that I never knew about.
Ironically
Hydrofluoric acid is the weakest acid chemically speaking, at least among the mineral acids.
But the fluorine makes up for that...and then some☹
Thanks for the awesome videos Plainly! Im a young engineer starting my career and your videos give me a lot to think about in regards to workplace safety!
I worked for a different part of Kerr McGee from 1989 to 1994. Oddly enough, I never heard much gossip about this incident. They kept most of us separated from the nuclear side of things.
Good stuff! Always interesting. So if your company has an embarrassing radiation accident, you need to arrange for something much worse shortly thereafter to take the focus away?
PS. I believe there is a typo in the title =)
Thank you, John, I always enjoy your videos. Hope you’re doing well, friend.
I been watching your videos for years, cool to see your progression as a creator.
"Uranium hexafluoride" sounds so comically dangerous that it's hard to take seriously
I get a little too nervous when I suspect my pressure cooker with beans in it is a little tighter than usual. These guys were basically challenging the grim reaper itself.
The captions of what your animated humans are pretty damn funny. Anytime there's an issue, one of them inevitably says "balls"
Edutainment is somehow the best content of this platform, I'm not complaining
Hey Jon,
Around 6m40s you mention the tanks are 5/8in thick steel but give the conversion 9.53mm which is actually 3/8in. 5/8 is just under 16mm thick.
The photo you posted earlier in the week had me guessing ships and submarines, never thought about land processing. Nice work on keeping me guessing for so long! :)
Nice bit of irony that Kerr is almost a homonym with care.
It’s so weird to me that in my old neighborhood, there’s a street named Kerr-McGee. The same neighborhood where I lived across the street from the apartments at the center of the 2014 Ebola scare in Dallas.
Sounds like you live in a fun neighbourhood!
That is near the I40 Bridge Collapse from 2002. Looks like a cursed place.
I didn't think a process more convoluted than a game of Cricket could exist, but the explanation of the processing pipeline from Yellowcake to UF6 deserves multiple viewings just by itself. One of those, "And that's how you do that," moments.
The preamble must have been interesting for PD to animate, because that seemed like a Rube Goldberg machine very quickly.
The major problem seems to be that they didn’t have proper procedures in place for what was probably something that was eventually going to happen. The staff were also not sufficiently educated in the rules. You look at something like the aircraft industry, which has procedures for most emergency and pilots are tested in simulators to deal with these.
I suppose I can guess where these filled tanks were headed; to Pikton, in mid Ohio. Gaseous diffusion plant, used to be one of the largest single buildings in the world. Now decommissioned. I'm sure Plainly Difficult could dig up a few cool stories about that place. In fact; all of Ohio would be a good subject to search for some great nuke stories. Most of the work to make a Uranium core bomb was done in Ohio, with final assembly in Texas. There used to be "White Trains" driving across Ohio, carrying bomb core components.
Kerr Mcgee use to have a railroad tie manufacturing facility here in Springfield, MO. They and the operation have been gone for over 20 years now. But every time I drive passed on the way to the grocery store I can still smell the creosote emanating from deposits in the ground.
So from a Civil litigation prospective, I am guessing this would potentially fall under an abnormally dangerous activity, and thus the company would be held strictly liable. There are certainly exceptions to this since it happened at it’s plant so potentially not, but still liable for negligence all day long. Regardless, that won’t bring a life back. How unnecessary and tragic
South Australian nuclear testing,
unless you've already done that video 👈🏼🤯👍
I remember looking at the bomb test sites and you can see where bulldozers scraped the surface layer off. In the middle of the desert there are these patchwork areas.
@@lewisdoherty7621 Oh that's mad, I'm from Perth 😎 I've driven along the coast of SA but not into the desert 👈😎👍🇦🇺
Well done in hitting million subs Plainly!
What else was that original operator meant to do? they saw an error, fixed a cart, found a hazard, took the right steps to fix it, and even alerted a supervisor.
They did everything in their power and when they left the building someone else blew the container up.
I love these videos.
"my bad"
Understatement of the year
It's always a bad sign when the disaster scale is higher than the legacy scale.
I'm actually one of the crew working on cleaning that site up today.When the guy says "The sight would take a long time to decommission and clean", lemme translate that rq:
1.) I'm writing this comment on September 15, 2021, having worked here for about 3 years. I've been recently informed we have about 6
months to a year left, though my supervisor once said that he thought the same thing years ago at one point and look where we are today.
2.) The company doing the cleanup isn't getting paid a set amount for the completion of the project: We get paid *per hour and per piece of equipment running.* Since there's no set maximum cost we have to stay under, working slowly and using as much equipment as possible = the most profitable route... though we're never told to do this directly, of course.
3.) As for the quality of the crew working on it?
.... the reason we're all safe (now) is because everything's buried now. A child with a gun's only so dangerous when there aren't any bullets to fire.
Multiple ex-cons, & when applications open from time to time we'll happily take entry-level forms from those looking hard at the choice between us and flipping burgers for a living. We've run haul trucks (AKA dump trucks, multi-thousand pound load capacity) full of radioactive mud up a 2:1 grade with the emergency brakes shot.
Another way to express that grade is for every two foot sideways, one foot up.
I arrange and format the list of equipment malfunctions every once in a while. It's never been less than 4 pages, and some of the entries have been on there since before June of this year (again, it's September as I write this). Don't worry, the E-brake problem got fixed long ago, now it's mostly just everything leaking hydraulic fluid.
No, since I've worked here I don't think we've been a risk to _the wider public,_ and in all fairness no I don't go to work everyday wondering what close call somebody's going to have next... but then again, I _have_ seen yellowcake with my own two eyes, and that wasn't supposed to happen.
When I say a child with a gun's only so dangerous when there aren't any bullets to fire?
*The last four were buried a few weeks ago. The vertical processing tanks.*
Um...are they just burying it? Because that's not decommissioning the site or cleaning it up
@@nipziedefine “it”.
Uranium and yellowcake? No. Liquids aren’t allowed in the cell (the place we’re burying stuff) and since we don’t have raw uranium just lying around the only form we would have it in would be a mix of it with some liquid.
Raffinate? Also no. Raffinate in our case is basically dirt at the bottom of some of the plant’s on-site ponds which had radioactive elements in it. This dirt was compressed to get the water out of it, and the water was dealt with separately long before I worked there. As of 2018, the last of the raffinate was shipped off for another plant to try and squeeze what useable material they could out of it, so it’s gone.
Impacted material? Yes, and it’s the whole reason we’re still there. To explain what impacted material is, imagine you set a wrench a foot away from a block of uranium, then leave that wrench there for a few hours and take the uranium block someplace else. The wrench, as well the table the uranium block was on, will now both set a geiger counter ticking at a fairly concerning rate to say the least. They are both _now_ radioactive due to exposure to radioactive material, but neither was so before hand. The table and the wrench are now considered “impacted”, and would have to be buried. You can’t wash off radiation itself, only loose material that emits it. Once the wrench becomes impacted material, it will ALWAYS be impacted material and ALWAYS radioactive... or at least that’s how we treat it (scientists smarter than me, feel free to call me out where I’m fuzzy).
Everything that made up the structures which made up this site is currently considered impacted material unless thoroughly inspected by the on-site health and safety team and found to be in the clear. Some items have been checked and released by these means, but it’s rare to say the least. We get paid to use heavy machinery to bury the stuff. Dragging anything out either isn’t profitable or- even if you tried to sell the 20+ year old stuff have in here- doesn’t compare to the literal millions the company makes burying it.
===
So to answer your question: No, not entirely. The big stuff you’d be concerned about is NOT being buried, and much (if not all) of it is already gone. Some impacted material from the old buildings is still there though, and that’s what we’re burying.
@@ravensquote7206 well a wrench just sitting near a uranium block doesn't become radioactive. It needs something to be physically contaminated on it or in it.
That plant is only an hour to the west of me!
I'd MOVE. Although you'd have to do your research on a safe place to live as radioactive material and contaminated free sites are harder to find. The NRC sounds like they are not in the public's best interest. After radioactive sites are supposedly cleaned up, keep in mind that EVEN the radiation is still there for hundreds of millions of years and can't really ever be cleaned up.
I live near a chicken farm, and I have done my research on the health of the water, and soil. I'm good where I live.
I’ve visited gore many times, and my boyfriend just told me about this a couple weeks ago
Right, that whole processing segment really solidified the notion that anything involving uranium is more complicated than rocket science.