Disposal Areas Limited for Low-Level Nuclear Waste : Atomic age: Problems of radioactive garbage have plagued utilities, government officials for years.

BARNWELL, S.C. —  The trucks hauling barrels of radioactive garbage rumble down Highway 64 to Snelling (population 125) and turn right at the Chem-Nuclear sign just short of where the road dead-ends.

“We used to have seven or eight shipments a day. Now there’s one or two,” said George Hurst, the retired Navy chief who oversees the daily management of one of the only two disposal sites in the country for low-level nuclear waste.

But the truck traffic is about to increase.

The South Carolina Legislature recently lifted a yearlong ban on waste shipments from outside the Southeast region, so workers are bracing for more radioactive deliveries from hospitals, research labs and nuclear power plants across the country.

To many, the Barnwell low-level waste dump seems feebly benign when compared with its neighbor, the federal Savannah River complex, where the government faces a daunting and expensive cleanup from decades of nuclear warhead production.

But the dump--with its life recently extended perhaps another decade--is yet another example of the nation’s failure to grapple with a legacy of the nuclear age: the disposal of the mountains of material that has become contaminated with relatively low levels of radiation at nuclear power plants, hospitals, universities and research laboratories in every state.

More than 12.6 billion cubic feet of such wastes have been generated over the last decade. Like the disposal of long-lived, highly radioactive reactor fuel, the problems in dealing with low-level waste has plagued electric utilities, government officials and citizens for years with still no clear solution.

A decade ago, Congress directed that states assume the responsibility for low-level wastes through regional compacts, but the effort has been largely a failure.

Today, not a single compact-created disposal site has been built, and none is even close to construction.

There remains “widespread concern about such facilities among the affected public and political officials,” Congress’ General Accounting Office said in a report in May.

Meanwhile, Barnwell has served as a release valve for wastes from 39 states. The only other disposal site, located near Richland, Wash., accepts deliveries only from nine Northwest and Rocky Mountain states as well as Alaska and Hawaii.

The dump, operated by Chem-Nuclear Systems Inc., a subsidiary of the giant Chicago-based WMX Technologies waste disposal company, rests on 311 acres of red clay carved from a sea of Southern pine.

In 1994, 733,896 cubic feet of radioactive waste, from contaminated clothing to parts of a dismantled nuclear power plant, were hauled in for burial at a charge of $152 a cubic foot.

A year ago, South Carolina barred shipments from outside the Southeast region, complaining, as one legislator put it, that the state was becoming “the pay toilet of the country” in the nuclear waste debate.

But in June state lawmakers, enamored with the prospect of reaping $140 million a year in waste disposal fees, reopened the dump to shipments from across the country for the next 10 years. The money will go to help the state’s financially strapped schools.

It was a major victory for Chem-Nuclear, which hired several of the state’s most connected lobbyists and reportedly spent more than $313,000 in a campaign to sway lawmakers.

It also was a victory of sorts for officials from Maine to Colorado, where local communities prefer transporting their nuclear garbage hundreds--at times thousands--of miles to Barnwell, rather than building their own disposal site.

In California, the state recently received a land transfer from the federal government for the Ward Valley site in the Mojave Desert. But it remains controversial and its future remains uncertain.

A proposal by Texas to operate a waste dump in Hudgpeth County near the Mexican border also has attracted local opposition and prompted charges of “environmental racism” because the area is poor and largely Mexican-American. Texas wants to accept wastes from Maine and Vermont as well, but needs approval from Congress.

Efforts to build a new dump in North Carolina for eight Southeastern states has produced tough talk from neighboring South Carolina.

South Carolina Gov. David Beasley is threatening to keep North Carolina waste out of Barnwell. North Carolina Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. said South Carolina’s threats are unconstitutional.

A dump to replace Barnwell was to have been completed in 1993, but now is likely in 1998 at the earliest.

Other states have been just as dilatory:

* In Nebraska, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, state officials have struggled for years to find a site, but have no clear notion when a dump will be built.

* Despite offering $1 million a year to any town willing to have a dump, Connecticut and Michigan have had no takers.

* In New York, the state waste dump siting commission recently disbanded because of money shortages. Past attempts to survey a site resulted in sometimes violent protests.

Although the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says low-level wastes are being disposed of safely, there have been disputes over their potential danger, disagreement over what should actually be declared “low-level” waste, and a history of environmental problems at waste sites that are now closed.

“We’ve got the craziest, most unscientific wastes classification scheme of anywhere in the world,” said Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear physicist and president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Tacoma Park, Md.

“We do not classify wastes according to hazard and [radioactive] longevity,” he said. “We classify it according to origin, and low-level waste is considered a catch-all.”

Medical syringes and surgical gloves from hospitals, protective clothing and booties from research laboratories, resins from filters at nuclear power plants, contaminated steam generators from a dismantled power plant--all are classified by the NRC as low-level wastes. All are buried at Barnwell.

The waste, most of which arrives in steel drums or in some cases packaged in concrete, is buried in shallow trenches 16 to 22 feet deep.

Some of the radioactivity will decay within months or a few years. But some long-lived radioactive elements--including small amounts of plutonium--won’t become harmless for hundreds of years.

The NRC requires protected containment from the general public for as long as 500 years and limits exposure to no more than 25 millirems of radiation a year through contaminated soil, water or air. By comparison, normal background radiation is about 125 millirems a year, while a normal chest X-ray gives off about 10 millirems.

“In 100 years, 98% [of the waste] will be decayed,” said Hurst as he maneuvers a pickup truck past one of Barnwell’s disposal trenches. He says there’s no noticeable radiation beyond normal background levels and Barnwell has had a clean environmental record since opening in 1971.

Environmentalists and citizen groups are not reassured.

Four of the original, but now closed, low-level waste dumps in Kentucky, Illinois, Nevada and New York all have had environmental problems, especially ground-water contamination, they say. And the closed Maxey Flats site in Kentucky is on the EPA’s Superfund toxic waste cleanup list.

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Low-Level Wastes

Facts and figures about low-level nuclear wastes:

Definition: Any radioactive waste that is not spent reactor fuel or products of irradiating uranium in a reactor, which is considered “high-level” waste.

Examples: Nuclear plant components and pipes and rubble exposed to radiation; reactor control rods; resins, filters and sludge from spent reactor fuel storage pools; protective clothing and booties; syringes, surgical gloves; laboratory equipment exposed to radiation.

How much: Amounts have been declining sharply because of rising cost of disposal and active campaigns to limit exposure of clothing and other items to radiation. Volumes: 2.68 million cubic feet in 1985; 1.14 million cubic feet in 1990; 792,000 cubic feet in 1993.

Waste sources: Nuclear power plants and reactors, 51%; industrial, 35%; medical facilities, 1%; academic institutions, 2%; government, 12%. (Percentages total more than 100 because of rounding.)

Radioactivity: Includes radioactive elements with half-lives ranging from a few days to thousands of years. Although most radioactivity is short-lived, long-lived radioactivity can be found in low-level wastes. Some examples: tritium, 12-year half-life; Strontium-90, 28-year half-life, and plutonium, 24,000-year half-life. A half-life is the time it takes for half of the radioactivity to decay. One half-life equals 10 years that an element poses a hazard.

NRC regulations: Shallow container burial allowed as long as radioactive releases into water, air, soil or through plants and animals result in less than 25 millirems of radiation per year to any person in the general population. Radiation from a normal chest X-ray is 10 millirems and general background radiation is 125 millirems per year. Agency requires controlled access to the material for 100 to 500 years, depending on radiation concentrations.

Source: Associated Press