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Ok. If anyone has been following this, the prior reports by WIPP staff of “stabilizing” the exhaust stacks wasn’t due to an explosion, but to ‘stabilize the filtration’, as they discovered it wasn’t trapping all the air. They sent in workers to install foam to seal up the filters that weren’t operating as efficiently as the DOE asserted (they asserted 99-99.9%).

We also know that the exhaust wasn’t switched over as they asserted (I’m not going to summarize ad nauseam here; just look at the prior post).

Anyway, now the details of eyewitnesses are coming out. One being the “Green Burst” over the substation which, oddly, is placed adjacent to the exhaust stack).

See here

http://pissinontheroses.blogspot.com/2014/04/max-alert-green-burst-at-wipp.html

The POTR blog is still asserting the release was ‘exothermic’, causing a problem for the CAMs in the mine, whose air intakes are only 5-6 feet off the floor with 12 foot ceilings. They may be right, but there’s no cause found (or released) by WIPP yet. I still believe it may be a combination of explosion (hydrogen) and some exothermic event, as they definitely did not find evidence of a mine cave-in. So ‘something’ was responsible for making airborne so much radioactive material. A hydrogen explosion fits the bill.

Just wanna state again that I find no technical reason for why they just didn’t ‘shut off’ the mine ventilation system the moment they detected radiation (ya know, nobody in the mine to be supplying fresh air for to compromise topside safety).

Also want to state for the record again that the WIPP incident has brought back to the forefront of the memories of those in the US how our government will respond to emergencies much more serious (Fukushima-like) and that all the people out there (some even here at FR) biased as such will tell us that breathing in hot particles that ‘dose’ at safe rates is still ‘ok’.

Also want to restate for the record that I was historically pro-nuclear. The more I find out about the US civilian nuclear industry and the management thereof by our government (balanced with all the secrets of TMI, Hanford and others, along with the intransigence of moving to something safer and 3 years post-Fukushima not even tabling a plan to replace similar reactors stateside)...I’m finding myself more & more on the other side.

I’ll keep following this, and updating, even though I think this thread is long forgotten (don’t tell me WIPP hasn’t been in the news.../s).