[cdn-nucl-l] An unusual hazard/risk

["Dukelow, James S Jr" <jim.dukelow@pnl.gov>]

The Hutchinson (KS) News <www.hutchnews.com> is reporting a natural gas
explosion Wednesday that destroyed two businesses, damaged 26 others, and
injured two people and a second natural gas explosion Thursday that destroyed a
mobile home and critically injured an elderly couple.  The city has been
declared a disaster area by the State of Kansas.  Seven sinkholes and geysers
have appeared around the city and gas escaping from one continues to burn.

Both explosions appear to be the result of leakage from a 3.2 billion cubic foot
Kansas Natural Gas storage cavern, utilizing an old salt mine.  The storage
cavern is 7 miles northwest of Hutchinson.  The site of both explosions is the
east side of Hutchinson, roughly 10 miles distant from the cavern.  Officials
speculate that the gas had migrated the 10 miles along underground cracks and
through groundwater aquifers.  Effectively, until the situation is better
understood, the whole city (roughly 45,000 population) has to be considered at
risk of future explosions.

I have a number of personal connections with this story.  My mother and father
both grew up in and near Hutchinson, which was my second home because of
frequent visits to grandparents over the years.  My uncles John and Sam and
their wives Novella and Evelyn still live there.  John and Novella live about a
mile north of the fairly large chunk of town that is currently evacuated.  As
close as I can tell, Sam and Evelyn live along the line between the cavern and
the explosions.  About twenty years ago, John and Novella returned from vacation
to discover that the duplex they lived in had blown up the day before, killing
their neighbor.  Natural gas.  Hutchinson is underlain by a large field of
bedded salt that extends some 50 or so miles to the northwest to the city of
Lyons.  Salt has been mined there for at least a hundred years.  In the 1960's,
while I was attending the University of Kansas, the Hutchinson/Lyons salt beds
were chosen by the Atomic Energy Commission as the site for a nuclear waste
repository.  My neighbor in Lawrence, William Hambleton, then Director of the
Kansas Geological Survey, almost singlehandedly stopped the project by pointing
out the inconvenient fact that the salt beds were shot through with oil well
boreholes, making them not a very good bet for truly isolating the waste.

Best regards.

Jim Dukelow
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Richland, WA
jim.dukelow@pnl.gov

These comments are mine and have not been reviewed and/or approved by my
management or by the U.S. Department of Energy.