Workers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico used organic cat litter to clean up nuclear waste. The litter triggered chemical reactions that later caused a drum to burst. US Department of Energy
We’ve all made this kind of mistake. A friend asks you to pick up some organic chicken and you buy free-range eggs, or your spouse asks for a dozen flowers and you bring back a dozen bags of flour. It’s worse when you are ordering items online and in a second language. Ever order one eggplant and receive one dozen? These things happen to the best of us. But imagine being the person who caused a nuclear accident by ordering the wrong kitty litter?
It happened in February 2014 at a nuclear weapons waste processing facility for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Anyone involved may be trying hard to forget that it ever happened. The confusion began with a typo in a request for “kitty litter/zeolite clay.” (Zeolites can also be used in energy storage as I wrote here).
At some point this was replaced with kitty litter (clay). This was further transformed into an order for organic cat litter, specifically the sWheat Scoop brand which the manufacturer claims is 100% wheat. Now while the word organic has a folk meaning to environmentalists and hipsters at your local cafe, to chemists it means something more specific.
A two-letter typo led to a $500 million nuclear accident that exposed 22 people to radioactive contamination. Oops. Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, NM. Photo by (US Department of Energy)
According to the Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) hyperglossary, the organic definition –– in the context of chemistry and materials, organic refers to a materials based on carbon (a chemical element abbreviated as C). Additional elements that are commonly found in organic materials are hydrogen (H), nitrogen (N), oxygen (O), phosphorus (P) and sulfur (S).
An unrelated and confusing definition of organic is used most often in reference to “natural” foods. For example, a simple definition of “organic produce” is fruits or vegetables that have been raised without the use of pesticides or herbicides. Of course, many pesticides and herbicides are actually themselves organic (using either or both definitions of “organic”).
Materials that are not organic are usually referred to as inorganic.
sWheatScoop kitty litter may have fit both the chemist and hipster definition of organic. But it was not what the nuclear waste chemists were looking for. To further confuse things, zeolite is not a clay even though it contains many of the same elements as clay and has some related properties. Zeolite takes in water by adsorption into a porous microstructure while clay slips water molecules between atomic sheets an a process called adsorbtion. (Apologies to autocorrect, yes adsorbtion and absorption really are two different things.)
So the boss’s request for zeolite clay might as well have been a request for a magic-colored unicorn, it doesn’t exist in this universe. Such is the imprecision of human languages in our complicated world.
Don’t try this at home
Green Prophet recently covered the possibilities of using Zeolite for energy storage and this amazing mineral has many more tricks up its sleeve. But while it might seem obvious that anything capable of detoxifying cat pee would be equally effective for nuclear waste disposal, this isn’t necessarily true.
The problem with using 100% organic wheat-based organic kitty litter for your nuclear waste disposal instead of zeolite (non-clay) kitty litter has to do with its reactivity and flammability when confined in a barrel with plutonium, americium, uranium and nitrate-based processing chemicals when compared to zeolite. It doesn’t help that all of this takes place deep underground in an abandoned salt mine where there is much more salt and nuclear waste than there are people to watch it.
So the problem wasn’t discovered until barrel #68660 burst, releasing radiation into a ventilation system. It is believed that several hundred nuclear waste barrels were contaminated with the wrong kind of kitty litter. The cost of the cleanup is said to have been more than half a billion.
So the next time you think you’ve had a bad day, think of this story and imagine how much worse it could be. And be careful with off-label uses of kitty litter.
Author: Brian Nitz
Brian remembers when a single tear dredged up a nation's guilt. The tear belonged to an Italian-American actor known as Iron-Eyes Cody, the guilt was displaced from centuries of Native American mistreatment and redirected into a new environmental awareness. A 10-year-old Brian wondered, 'What are they... No, what are we doing to this country?' From a family of engineers, farmers and tinkerers Brian's father was a physics teacher. He remembers the day his father drove up to watch a coal power plant's new scrubbers turn smoke from dirty grey-back to steamy white. Surely technology would solve every problem. But then he noticed that breathing was difficult when the wind blew a certain way. While sailing, he often saw a yellow-brown line on the horizon. The stars were beginning to disappear. Gas mileage peaked when Reagan was still president. Solar panels installed in the 1970s were torn from roofs as they were no longer cost-effective to maintain. Racism, public policy and low oil prices transformed suburban life and cities began to sprawl out and absorb farmland. Brian only began to understand the root causes of "doughnut cities" when he moved to Ireland in 2001 and watched history repeat itself. Brian doesn't...
