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A failed multimillion-dollar radiation-detection system. Why didn't they have this activated? "The toxic seawater was sucked into the ship’s desalinization sys

A failed multimillion-dollar radiation-detection system. Why didn't they have this activated? "The toxic seawater was sucked into the ship’s desalinization system, flowing out of its faucets and showers — still radioactive — and into the crew member’s bodies."

skriticos2 13y ago
They could have sidestepped the whole issue with a simple reverse-osmosis water filter. Somehow I get the impression that they did not think the ABC (edit: CBRN) thing through.
- JshWright 13y ago
  A "simple" reverse-osmosis system? A Nimitz class carrier can produce somewhere in the neighborhood of 400,000 gallons of desalinated (potable) water a day. Desalination is very energy intensive, but energy is something that a nuclear powered carrier has plenty of. There are obviously some consumables involved, but it's mostly just energy, and lots of it. RO, on the other hand, requires a lot of high quality, small pore filters and membranes that need to be cleaned and changed regularly. RO systems have dramatically lower throughputs than desalination systems of similar size. An RO system capable of producing 400,000 gallons/day (especially one capable of filtering radioisotopes that are (while larger than a water molecule), still quite small) would be very large, and very maintenance intensive. But hey... you're probably right... The folks who designed the potable water infrastructure for the Nimitz class aircraft carriers were probably idiots...
  - scotty79 13y ago
    > The folks who designed the potable water infrastructure for the Nimitz class aircraft carriers were probably idiots. You are not an idiot just for doing something stupid. All people, even the smartest ones have capacity to do dangerously stupid things. In this case they probably just weren't ordered to built a system that can provide clean water in case of the ship being covered in radioactive snow. So the people doing stupid things (possibly, but not necessarily, idiots) were the people who gave orders. Still hard to imagine for a country that treats nuclear war sort of seriously. Of course I think you are totally right about RO being non-easy. I have no idea about RO and desalination systems but my motto is "nothing's ever easy".
    - JshWright 13y ago
      >In this case they probably just weren't ordered to built a system that can provide clean water in case of the ship being covered in radioactive snow. I think it's even more likely that they weighed the advantages and disadvantages of each system, and decided that a waste heat desalination system would be a _much_ better fit then a huge, expensive, high maintenance RO system. My point was simply that this was almost certainly an informed decision, not an oversight (or just 'following orders').
  - maxerickson 13y ago
    It seems like distillation should anyway be leaving behind a great deal of the contamination. I guess that is not sufficient for radioactive contamination, but direct exposure seems likely to be the bigger problem in this situation. (It also seems to be a possibility that they were using (contaminated) seawater for decontamination procedures, but that is hard find reasonable information about)
  - throwaway_yy2Di 13y ago
    Actually, it looks like Ford-class carriers use, or will use (?), reverse osmosis for desal: http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/657412.pdf http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/657412.pdf RO is already used in utility-scale desal plants: http://www.pub.gov.sg/water/Pages/DesalinatedWater.aspx http://www.pub.gov.sg/water/Pages/DesalinatedWater.aspx "This plant can produce 30 million gallons of water a day (136, 000 cubic meters) and is one of the region’s largest seawater reverse-osmosis plants."
    - JshWright 13y ago
      Yeah, they've done away with many of the steam systems on the new carriers (including the catapult launch system, which is now electric). If you're trying to minimize energy (particularly steam) usage, then RO starts to make a bit more sense. On the Nimitz class, they have plenty of waste heat from the powerplant, and already had numerous steam distributions systems in place.

skriticos2 13y ago

They could have sidestepped the whole issue with a simple reverse-osmosis water filter. Somehow I get the impression that they did not think the ABC (edit: CBRN) thing through.

JshWright 13y ago
A "simple" reverse-osmosis system? A Nimitz class carrier can produce somewhere in the neighborhood of 400,000 gallons of desalinated (potable) water a day. Desalination is very energy intensive, but energy is something that a nuclear powered carrier has plenty of. There are obviously some consumables involved, but it's mostly just energy, and lots of it. RO, on the other hand, requires a lot of high quality, small pore filters and membranes that need to be cleaned and changed regularly. RO systems have dramatically lower throughputs than desalination systems of similar size. An RO system capable of producing 400,000 gallons/day (especially one capable of filtering radioisotopes that are (while larger than a water molecule), still quite small) would be very large, and very maintenance intensive. But hey... you're probably right... The folks who designed the potable water infrastructure for the Nimitz class aircraft carriers were probably idiots...
- scotty79 13y ago
  > The folks who designed the potable water infrastructure for the Nimitz class aircraft carriers were probably idiots. You are not an idiot just for doing something stupid. All people, even the smartest ones have capacity to do dangerously stupid things. In this case they probably just weren't ordered to built a system that can provide clean water in case of the ship being covered in radioactive snow. So the people doing stupid things (possibly, but not necessarily, idiots) were the people who gave orders. Still hard to imagine for a country that treats nuclear war sort of seriously. Of course I think you are totally right about RO being non-easy. I have no idea about RO and desalination systems but my motto is "nothing's ever easy".
  - JshWright 13y ago
    >In this case they probably just weren't ordered to built a system that can provide clean water in case of the ship being covered in radioactive snow. I think it's even more likely that they weighed the advantages and disadvantages of each system, and decided that a waste heat desalination system would be a _much_ better fit then a huge, expensive, high maintenance RO system. My point was simply that this was almost certainly an informed decision, not an oversight (or just 'following orders').
- maxerickson 13y ago
  It seems like distillation should anyway be leaving behind a great deal of the contamination. I guess that is not sufficient for radioactive contamination, but direct exposure seems likely to be the bigger problem in this situation. (It also seems to be a possibility that they were using (contaminated) seawater for decontamination procedures, but that is hard find reasonable information about)
- throwaway_yy2Di 13y ago
  Actually, it looks like Ford-class carriers use, or will use (?), reverse osmosis for desal: http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/657412.pdf http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/657412.pdf RO is already used in utility-scale desal plants: http://www.pub.gov.sg/water/Pages/DesalinatedWater.aspx http://www.pub.gov.sg/water/Pages/DesalinatedWater.aspx "This plant can produce 30 million gallons of water a day (136, 000 cubic meters) and is one of the region’s largest seawater reverse-osmosis plants."
  - JshWright 13y ago
    Yeah, they've done away with many of the steam systems on the new carriers (including the catapult launch system, which is now electric). If you're trying to minimize energy (particularly steam) usage, then RO starts to make a bit more sense. On the Nimitz class, they have plenty of waste heat from the powerplant, and already had numerous steam distributions systems in place.