Nuclear Waste News November 04, 2004
Congress downgrades sludge classification at Savannah, Hanford
A $ 447 billion defense bill Congress passed in October includes a provision that changes how the DOE classifies and treats radioactive sludge at the Savannah River nuclear facility in South Carolina. Like the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) and the Hanford reservation in Washington state, the Savannah River site hosts large amounts of leftover radioactive waste from the manufacture of Cold-War era nuclear weapons.
Under the new provision DOE can designate the sludge as "incidental" rather than "high-level" waste. That means that the sludge can stay in the underground tanks instead of being sent to a high-security repository, such as that being planned at Yucca Mountain.
DOE argues that the sludge would be expensive and difficult to remove from the tanks. It proposes to pour concrete grout into the tanks to immobilize the waste. Thus stabilized, it no longer will be a high-level danger, DOE claims.
Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham backed the measure, saying that it allows the agency to "move forward with safe and sensible environmental cleanup" of the tanks. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who attached the provision to the defense bill, believes that if the sludge need not be moved, the site cleanup will proceed faster without harming the environment. The tanks at Savannah River contain 34 million gallons of liquid radioactive waste, of which only 1 percent is sludge. All of the rest of the waste will still need to be removed.
"Because of this agreement, we're looking to do it 23 years ahead of schedule and at a cost savings to the taxpayer of almost $ 16 billion," he said in a statement.
Environmentalists fear that the long-lived radio isotopes in the compound could seep from the grouted sludge into the surrounding soil and groundwater where the tanks are buried.
Washington state officials, who are negotiating standards for the cleanup of 177 tanks of radioactive liquid and sludge at Hanford, oppose the reclassification, fearing that it could make it harder to move similar waste out of Hanford.
This is not the first time Energy has tried to reclassify sludge. INEEL sidestepped a unilateral DOE reclassification attempt in 2003 when environmental lawyer Geoffrey Fettus persuaded a federal court in Idaho to prohibit it. The new legislation reverses that ruling for the Savannah River and Hanford sites, but lets it stand at INEEL. Idaho officials supported the bill once their facility was excluded from that provision.
Graham said that South Carolina lawmakers have accepted his assurance that the grouted sludge is environmentally safe, and that state agencies and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will periodically review the cleanup plan.
Jeremy Maxand, director of the Snake River Alliance in Idaho, says that his state is alert to new moves that he thinks will weaken INEEL cleanup efforts because DOE tried to make a change without consulting the public. "That is not how you should make policy," he told the Associated Press. "This isn't how you build relationships with communities."
Contact: Savannah River Site overview, http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/facility/savannah_river.htm; Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, http://www.oversight.state.id.us/index. cfm; S.C. Senator Lindsey Graham, (202) 2245972, http://lgraham.senate.gov/index.cfm?mode =issues&cid=2116
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