Phase 1 of Nuke Cleanup Nears End

["Sandy Perle" <sandyfl@earthlink.net>]

Sunday May 16 12:02 PM ET 

Phase 1 of Nuke Cleanup Nears End

WEST VALLEY, N.Y. (AP) - More than 600,000 gallons of highly 
radioactive waste have been solidified into glass, nearly completing 
the first phase of a cleanup at what was once the country's only 
commercial reprocessing center for nuclear fuel.  

The lethal leftovers from three decades ago are now in the form of 
10-foot glass logs stored in individual steel canisters and stacked 
behind concrete walls 4 feet thick. The 250 capsules are visible 
through equally thick windows but are touched only by robotic 
arms. They will endure for 10,000 years.  

``If you hugged one of these things you wouldn't last a minute,'' 
said Terry Dunford, spokesman for the West Valley Demonstration 
Project, peering through a mineral oil-filled window that gives the 
storage room an eerie yellow hue.   

The containers are destined, someday, for a repository that does 
not yet exist, perhaps Nevada's Yucca Mountain.  

As painstaking and technologically challenging as the three-year 
$1.3 billion waste-to-glass process has been - using remote-
controlled equipment to do everything from mix the glass to stack 
the canisters - the hardest part of the West Valley cleanup is yet 
to come.  

Next, it must be decided what to do with the 3,300-acre site itself, 
situated deep in farmland in western New York, 40 miles south of 
Buffalo.  

Four options now on the table include indefinitely monitoring and 
maintaining the site at a cost of $30 million per year, to removing 
all traces of the project and its waste, at a cost of $8 billion.  

The other options: store all waste and residual contamination in an 
above-ground facility, at a cost of $3.7 billion, or fill the tank and 
other underground facilities with concrete and cap the site, at a 
cost of roughly $1 billion.  

U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson has given state and federal 
authorities one year to agree on how to proceed.

``It's at a crossroads right now,'' said James Little, executive vice 
president of West Valley Nuclear Services Co., a subsidiary of 
Westinghouse Electric Corp. ``There's no clearcut solution here.''  

The private Nuclear Fuel Services reprocessed nuclear fuel rods on 
200 acres of the site from 1966 to 1972. NFS believed there was 
money to be made in recovering used uranium to make new fuel. 
But when the project halted for expansion in 1972 after processing 
640 tons of fuel, it was never to resume, deterred by high costs and 
increasingly stringent government controls.  

Left behind were an underground carbon-steel tank of liquid waste 
measuring 70 feet in diameter and 30 feet deep, a concrete-walled 
processing facility littered with pieces of nuclear fuel rods and 
spent fuel assemblies stored in water.  

The state took control of the site in 1976. Four years later, 
President Carter signed the West Valley Demonstration Project 
Act authorizing its cleanup.  

Westinghouse, the developer of the atomic engine for the first 
nuclear-powered sub, the USS Nautilus, has been the project's 
primary contractor since 1982.  

The waste-to-glass process, known as vitrification, was undertaken 
to keep the liquid from seeping, as a result of rupture or corrosion, 
through the single-hulled storage tank into the ground. The site is 
criscrossed by several streams and the waste eventually could 
have found its way to Lake Erie and Buffalo's water intakes. Had 
that happened, the city's drinking water might have been 
contaminated for 300 years.  

During vitrification, liquid waste is mixed with silica, heated to 
about 2,000 degrees and poured into the stainless steel canisters, 
which are then capped, dipped in acid to remove excess glass and 
placed on carts to be rolled into storage.  

``These guys are wizards,'' Little said of the workers who 
accomplish the delicate task via remote control and video screens 
as if playing a video game. ``They can take an aspirin bottle, take 
the cap off and remove a single aspirin.''  

Some of the low-level waste from West Valley is transported by 
tractor-trailers to a site in Clive, Utah. Those shipments began last 
year.  

With 250 canisters of the high-level waste filled, about 10 more 
remain to be filled, but the difficulty in getting at the remaining 
sludge in the bottom of the tank has slowed progress.  

The work so far has impressed the Coalition on West Valley 
Nuclear Wastes, a citizens group that has been a constant 
watchdog for 25 years.  

``We're pleased to death that it worked,'' Carol Mongerson said of 
the solidification. ``We're pleased to see they've gotten through it - 
and relieved.''  

As for the next step of cleanup, the coalition favors the removal of 
the tank from the site and for material buried in an on-site dump to 
be excavated and stored on site only until a permanent repository 
opens.  

That is the most costly solution among the four now on the table.

``We would like to see that tank removed, not just filled with 
concrete,'' Ms. Mongerson said, ``at least before institutional 
control ends. That's another large issue. How long are we going to 
have the government - either the DOE or the state - on site?''  

The answer to that is not yet known. 

------------------------
Sandy Perle
E-Mail: sandyfl@earthlink.net
Personal Website: http://www.geocities.com/capecanaveral/1205

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