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Srs' Nuclear Trash ; Site Wants Waste Shipped Away, but Where Will It Go?

Posted on: Saturday, 31 December 2005, 03:02 CST

By Josh Gelinas

There are 49 tanks at Savannah River Site filled with liquid waste so radioactive that direct human contact would prove deadly.

It is among the most contaminated substances in the world, and some of it has been sitting idle at SRS for half a century.

Before month's end, the Nuclear Regulatory Com-mission is expected to rule on a Department of Energy plan to leave lower- level tank wastes on site, allowing the agency to rid the tanks of nuclear sludge gathered over decades of Cold War weapons production.

The milestone order is expected to close more than two years of indecision over how the Energy Department will proceed. It is the result of federal legislation passed in 2004 that basically gave the DOE power to classify waste, usurping a federal lawsuit that tried to stop officials from leaving some leftovers at the nuclear reservation.

With the NRC's blessing, officials say they're optimistic about meeting state deadlines to have many of the tanks emptied by 2022.

"Our ability to meet the time line is directly proportional to our getting approval under the legislation," said Will Davis, a manager over liquid waste for Washington Savannah River Co., the private contractor that runs SRS.

There are other, less-contaminated radioactive by-products at the site that will be shipped away. Still others will be buried there.

The DOE plans to rid the site of Cold War waste by 2025. When it reaches its goals will depend, in large part, on decisions and steps it is taking right now.

The most serious threat is the site's lethal nuclear trash.

"The No. 1 risk to human health is in the high-level waste tanks," said Perry Holcomb, who formerly worked at SRS and now serves on its Citizens Advisory Board, which monitors site activities.

Site officials are performing a juggling act of sorts as they try to empty the tanks and process other high-level hazards at the site, a cycle that inevitably produces more waste.

Time also is a factor because some tanks are in worse shape than others. State officials are monitoring 22 labeled "noncompliant" because they lack a sufficient secondary leak containment system. There are 13 that have a history of leakage.

Though tank levels are dropped below leak sites, other complications have surfaced.

Officials learned recently that construction will be delayed by two years until 2011 on a key cleanup component - a facility called the Salt Waste Processing Facility that would separate high- and low- level wastes from one another.

It's not clear how much the delay could slow the cleaning process - high-level waste that contains large amounts of the radioactivity can be removed and pumped to the Defense Waste Processing Facility in the meantime.

"We're not certain what the implications are," said Shelly Sheritt, a federal facilities liaison with the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, who works directly with SRS officials toward cleaning up the site.

THERE ARE TWO FACILITIES at SRS that generated the site's waste. They're called H- and F-Canyon, respectively.

The massive facilities turned depleted and enriched uranium from six nuclear reactors at the site into plutonium or fuel for nuclear reactors. The giant factories were tasked with separating plutonium and enriched uranium from dirty-fission by-products such as cesium and strontium, which amounts to nuclear trash.

The plutonium made its way to nuclear weapons; nuclear fuel made its way to reactors. The waste was siphoned into the tanks that officials are now trying to close.

Today, F-Canyon is being decommissioned, a coup for cleanup officials. H-Canyon, meanwhile, remains active.

Congress and DOE have to decide how to handle 36 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel at SRS, some that was created there and other quantities that were shipped there from around the world. One alternative is reprocessing, or recycling, the fuel through H- Canyon.

The potential problem is that by doing so, additional waste is pumped into the tanks.

"That's what DOE is looking at right now - how to proceed with these," said Rick Ford, a spokesman for the agency at SRS.

Another option is shipping the fuel as-is to the Yucca Mountain geological repository in Nevada, where high-level waste from the site's tanks is destined.

That leads to a potentially larger issue.

Nevada officials went to court and successfully forced the En- vironmental Protection Agency to extend the projected amount of time Yucca Mountain will remain safe from 10,000 years to 1 million years. Federal funding to the site also has to decrease.

Those are complications with the potential for far-reaching impact at SRS.

"We are hugely dependent on Yucca Mountain being successful," said Bob McQuinn, the deputy chief closure officer for Washington over waste cleanup at SRS.

"Yucca Mountain defined how classification would work," he said, referring to the glass canisters that store high-level tank waste are supposed to be shipped there.

TIME IS RUNNING OUT for the DOE to accomplish some of its existing goals.

The Energy Department plans to start shipping the canisters to Yucca Mountain in 2012, according to the SRS End State Vision document it issued in July.

The document, which outlines how the site will deal with its wastes and hazards into the future, highlights just how much SRS plans to lean on the proposed burial ground. There is no backup burial site listed in the document.

It also states that a portion of spent nuclear fuel will go to Yucca Mountain, in addition to an unspecified amount of plutonium.

And even though the EPA is working to appease Nevada, a political battle looms.

U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, a top-ranking Nevada Democrat, plans to introduce legislation proposing to leave nuclear waste where it sits at DOE and commercial power sites across the country, said Tessa Hafen, a spokeswoman for Mr. Reid. It's safer, she said, than shipping potentially dangerous materials that could fall into the wrong hands or spill en route to the repository.

The selection of Yucca Mountain was an arbitrary process, as was the science used to calculate radioactivity rates in the future, Ms. Hafen said.

"It was a political choice, and Nevada didn't have the powerful senators that we do today," she said.

If it comes down to a political face-off, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., says Mr. Reid lacks the muscle. It was Mr. Graham who shepherded the 2004 Defense Authorization Act through Congress that allowed DOE to classify tank waste in a way that allows them to bury some on site.

He argues that Mr. Reid will be outgunned by the many politicians who represent states that want to ship waste to Yucca.

"If it is not opened in the next decade, we as a nation will have a serious problem," Mr. Graham said.

"We spent billions of dollars on Yucca Mountain. It's now time to use the place."

Some, including Mr. Holcomb, contend that any safety projections thousands of years into the future contain a great deal of uncertainty.

Safety projections for lower-level wastes that will be left at SRS look 10,000 years into the future, a figure that was accepted by the NRC before the Nevada lawsuit. That span is twice as long as mankind's recorded history, the EPA points out.

Without Yucca, the alternative is most likely long-term waste storage at SRS.

Officials want most high-level hazards from the Cold War out of the site by 2020, a goal that ambitiously pre-empts even state deadlines, according to the SRS End State Vision.

There's nothing in the document that spells out what would happen without Yucca.

The oldest of the site's waste tanks are being emptied first to avoid additional leaks. But if Yucca or another repository isn't opened, storage could become an issue.

There is an existing facility that can store 2,500 canisters that contain high-level tank waste after it has been turned into glass, and a second facility with equal capacity is set to open in January.

But the site filled its 2,000th canister with glass at the end of November, and is on pace to fill both storage facilities in eight to 10 years, said Marshall Miller, a chief engineer who works at the site's glass-waste facility. Overall, the site is supposed to fill 5,500 canisters with waste, and that doesn't include potential waste from the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel.

The storage facilities, where the steel canisters are lowered into the ground, are adequate for "at least 50 years," Mr. Miller said. But "it's called an interim storage facility," he added.

ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS about plutonium storage at SRS also remain murky.

There are an estimated 50 tons of excess across the country, and at least 34 tons of weapons-grade plutonium are destined for SRS from other DOE sites, which will be converted into fuel for commercial nuclear reactors.

But there are 13 more tons at or coming to SRS that aren't clean enough for the conversion process, called mixed-oxide fuel fabrication, or MOX. The site's End State Vision lists no remedy.

There is, however, $10 million set aside in the SRS budget for the study and design of a facility that could package the excess for eventual storage at Yucca, Mr. Ford said.

Still, construction on MOX isn't set to begin until May 2006, and a separate facility that will prepare plutonium for the process also must be constructed. How much of the deadly material already has been shipped to SRS is classified, though a federal report released in July shows that there have been talks about consolidating all of the country's excess plutonium at SRS.

The report, produced by the Government Accountability Office, has fanned concerns that SRS would become a long-term storage facility if the MOX program or Yucca falls through. Aiken County filed a lawsuit earlier this year asking the DOE to stop receiving shipments of plutonium until plans were clarified.

The agency has yet to respond to the suit. But according to a DOE letter in the GAO's report, there is a committee studying the consolidation of plutonium in one place.

"To improve security and reduce costs, DOE plans to establish enough storage capacity in the event it decides to consolidate its non-pit plutonium for interim storage until it can be permanently disposed of in a geologic repository at Yucca Mountain," the report states.

A spokesman at DOE's headquarters in Washington said no decision had been reached on whether to consolidate plutonium at any DOE location.

Mr. Ford said SRS was not authorized to receive any plutonium unsuitable for MOX.

"Is there enough space available? The answer is yes," he said.

THERE ARE RISKS associated with storing plutonium for the long term at SRS, the GAO report states, namely that canisters that store the material are safe for a "minimum of 50 years" and that current monitoring methods must be improved. It also lists the need for increased security, as plutonium is a terrorist target.

Arjun Makhijani, a scientist with the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research who monitors the nuclear industry, cautioned that if South Carolina is truly concerned about storing hazardous materials, it "ought to advocate a backup, second-level repository" other than Yucca Mountain.

"Right now, the recourse is that it will be at Savannah River forever," he said.

In some respects, the DOE and the nation as a whole are wading into uncharted waters. Projections for plutonium storage and Yucca Mountain alike are based on scientific calculations, not experience.

The nuclear age only came to fruition during the 1950s. And as one observer put it, "we've never stored plutonium for 50 years before."

The DOE's focus has slowly shifted since the Cold War between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union, which unofficially ended in the early 1990s without a shot fired from either side.

The last nuclear reactor at SRS that helped create plutonium was deactivated in 1992. In 2000, the DOE created its Environmental Management Division.

TODAY, F-Canyon is slowly being dismantled. Recently a yellow crane with a mechanized claw at its end could be seen tearing down a facility adjacent to the canyon that used to produce reactor fuel for naval vessels.

Barrels of low-level wastes, protective suits and materials that came in contact with radioactive materials, are being shipped out of the facility.

Some items will be sent to a burial ground in New Mexico. Less- contaminated items will be buried at SRS.

It's important, some say, that the site has moved ahead to rid itself of lower-level wastes, even if questions remain about more- hazardous quantities.

Although environmentalists remain critical of the DOE's overall attempts to clean up the Cold War legacy, others are more optimistic.

"The emphasis was production of weapons-grade material," said Dave Swale, the vice president of BNG America Savannah River Corp., which handles low-level solid waste.

"The waste was put on one side to be dealt with later," he said. "Now we're dealing with it."

Reach Josh Gelinas at (803) 648-1395, ext. 110, or josh.gelinas@augustachronicle.com.

Source: Augusta Chronicle, The

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