Earlier this week, many of us spent more time than we wanted dealing with a Meltdown Denier who posited a contrarian take on the 1959 partial meltdown of the Sodium Reactor Experiment.
The Denier’s piece suffered from being markedly uninformed in the science of the situation. There is no replacement for hitting the books to master this subject, and fortunately a resource exists that can vastly expand one’s knowledge, which EnviroReporter.com has used for years: the Interstate Technology & Regulatory Council (ITRC). The IRTC gets financial support from the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Its website states that “ITRC is a state-led coalition working together with industry and stakeholders to achieve regulatory acceptance of environmental technologies,” the group’s website says. “ITRC accomplishes its mission in two ways: it develops guidance documents and training courses to meet the needs of both regulators and environmental consultants, and it works with state representatives to ensure that ITRC products and services have maximum impact among state environmental agencies and technology users.”
The amount of cogent information is amazing. The EPA’s Technology Innovation Program has live web seminars for free with web-based slide presentations with a companion audio portion, and live talk and chat. The current schedule and archives are a must for people who want to know their radiation, chemicals and all the ways to remediate their contamination in a host of situations, all grim.
Sound like fun? It is and you get the added benefit of not coming off like a complete ding-a-ling when you try to explain away a meltdown that the Department of Energy itself, the very agency that owned the failed reactor, calls a meltdown (and not even a “partial” one at that), as evidenced in their April 2009 DOE newsletter:
“July 2009 will mark 50 years since the Sodium Reactor Experiment (SRE) meltdown, and we are planning a meeting in the near future about the accident. We know the SRE meltdown continues to be an issue of interest and concern among our stakeholders, and we want to begin to address, to the extent possible, issues of most interest to Santa Susana stakeholders.”
Accessing the vast knowledge offered by the Interstate Technology & Regulatory Council and Technology Innovation Program is a must for those folks keen on contributing intelligent and constructive input about a place that may have cost many people much more than the hundreds of millions we’re spending to clean up The Hill.
25 Years of Award-Winning SSFL/Rocketdyne Reporting
1998 – 2023
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