RE: Phase 1 of Nuke Cleanup Nears End

[Glen.Vickers@ucm.com]

Doesn't this article sound a little too exciting.  Just a continuation of
the "larger than life" perspective that the public has?  I'm sure the truth
without adjectives is really quite boring.

sincerely,
glen

glen.vickers@ucm.com

	-----Original Message-----
	From:	Sandy Perle [SMTP:sandyfl@earthlink.net]
	Sent:	Sunday, May 16, 1999 11:42 AM
	To:	Multiple recipients of list
	Subject:	Phase 1 of Nuke Cleanup Nears End

	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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