Panel criticizes nuclear cleanups
BOISE – The U.S. Department of Energy is making good progress removing highly radioactive waste from storage tanks at the Idaho National Laboratory, but an independent panel of scientists reported to Congress on Tuesday they have “serious reservations” about similar cleanup efforts at Savannah River in South Carolina and Hanford in Washington state.
The government-sponsored study found DOE has cleaned out only 2 of the 246 radioactive waste storage tanks at the three federal nuclear compounds, and none has been permanently sealed.
The agency has been studying ways to immobilize the liquefied radioactive waste stored in underground tanks and surface silos at the three sites for 50 years. In 2004, Congress directed the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academies of Science, to assess the program.
Nuclear cleanup watchdogs praised the findings and said DOE cannot be trusted to remove the waste properly.
The report found it is not practical to remove all the nuclear waste from the storage tanks because of the potential danger to workers and the prohibitive cost of exhuming the tanks, which vary widely in design, size and condition.
But the 21-member committee of scientists did not specify how much of the waste DOE should retrieve from the vats, encase in glass and bury in an underground repository or how much it should leave behind in the tanks, which would then be filled with a cement-like grout and remain on site.
Much of the Idaho waste is in a granular form, which the panel found to be much more stable.
“Because of treatment decisions INL made over the years to get it into a granular form, they chemically made it easier to deal with and we don’t have the problems faced by the other two sites,” said Kathleen Trever, the state of Idaho’s oversight officer for INL.
Federal law requires the DOE to retrieve highly radioactive material from the tank sludge and encapsulate it in a solid form, such as glass logs, for permanent disposal.
In 2003, U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill in Boise ruled that the regulatory attempt by the Energy Department to reclassify the waste so it would not have to be removed from the tanks violated the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act.
Congress added language to the 2005 defense spending bill giving DOE authority to reclassify some of the tank waste as “incidental” waste in the Savannah River and Idaho tanks so they could be grouted and sealed.
The study panel said it was concerned over DOE’s plans for tank closure at Savannah River, questioning the assumptions the agency had made about potential exposure and the amount of nuclear waste to be disposed of on site.
The study also raised questions about DOE’s plan to use a process known as bulk vitrification for treating low-level radioactive waste for disposal on site at Hanford. The panel called for an independent technical review of the process to determine its safety and performance, something that Megan Barnett, a DOE spokeswoman in Washington, D.C., said DOE is planning to do and something that Hanford watchdogs say is longer overdue.
“Our own analysis shows there are major problems with safety, worker exposure and environmental contamination,” said Tom Carpenter of the Government Accountability Project’s nuclear oversight campaign in Seattle “This was just a quick and dirty attempt to deal with high-level nuclear waste.”