Wednesday, April 15, 1998 | 9:15 a.m.
But Nevada politicians and residents, unnerved by a December shipment's leak in Arizona, are urging the department to be cautious and correct past mistakes before resuming the cross-country truck shipments.
"It's definitely a high priority for us," Karen Kirchgasser, press secretary for Sen. Richard Bryan, D-Nev., said Tuesday. "We want all the questions answered before the shipments are resumed."
Bryan wants the Energy Department to ensure that adequate testing is done on the metal containers used to hold the wastes, Ms. Kirchgasser said.
The Fernald operation is also under pressure from neighboring residents to resume the shipments and reduce the amount of waste at the site 18 miles northwest of Cincinnati.
Members of Fernald Residents for Environmental Safety and Health want the shipments resumed as soon as possible, spokeswoman Edwa Yocum said Tuesday. They are worried that the Nevada test site might not accept any more waste from the 1,050-acre Fernald site.
"Then we would be stuck with the waste here on site," Mrs. Yocum said.
The department's Fernald field office and its cleanup contractor are still choosing a modified design of the waste containers, said John Sattler, leader of Fernald's waste management team.
A container leaked Dec. 15 near Kingman, Ariz. No one was injured, and no evacuations were required.
Sattler said he could not predict exactly when the truck shipments will resume because the department and its Nevada test site, where the wastes are sent for permanent disposal, must approve the plan.
"We have done a lot of work. We have made a lot of progress," Sattler said.
Fernald officials are working to determine why the metal container - which is larger than a refrigerator - failed, whether additional protection should be provided during waste shipping and ways to improve safety monitoring, Sattler said.
Some of Fernald's wastes are to be buried on site but the bulk is to be disposed of elsewhere.
All of Fernald's waste shipments to Nevada have been halted since December. That includes construction rubble, uranium materials from processing operations halted when Fernald ceased operation in 1989, and radioactive material from filtered waste water. Small volumes of waste have been sent to other disposal sites.
Through the end of March, Fernald had been scheduled to ship out 161,000 cubic feet of waste. But only 12,000 cubic feet have been shipped so far, Sattler said.
In a Feb. 6 report, the Energy Department blamed faulty containers and inadequate supervision for the December leak. Officials said water was discovered leaking from two of seven metal containers being transported in a tractor-trailer truck.
The leaking boxes carried solid waste - earth and chalk-like silica that contained trace amounts of uranium - but were found to be leaking water that formed in the wastes.
Investigators concluded that the water seeped through container cracks that developed during handling at Fernald, then opened because of vibrations on the road.
The plant processed uranium metal for the government's production of nuclear weapons elsewhere from 1951 until the work ended in 1989 so workers could concentrate on waste cleanup at the site. The cleanup won't be finished until after 2005, the government estimates.
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