DOE plan would send low-level waste to Test Site

Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2001 | 11:11 a.m.

Fifty truckloads a year of low-level radioactive wastes mixed with toxic chemicals will travel Las Vegas highways en route to the Nevada Test Site, if a Department of Energy plan is approved.

DOE officials have asked the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection for a permit to bury the mixed wastes at the Test Site's Area 5, along the site's eastern edge.

Over a 10-year period those extra loads of radioactive and toxic waste would be enough to cover a football field to a depth of 10 feet, Carl Gertz, DOE's assistant environmental manager in Nevada, said Tuesday.

That's not much more than the low-level radioactive materials coming to the Test Site already, Gertz said. "It's about a 10 percent increase," he said.

The DOE does not expect any mixed waste shipments before late 2002, DOE spokeswoman Nancy Harkess said.

For decades the DOE has dumped low-level nuclear wastes from federal weapons work, such as contaminated soils, laboratory equipment and clothing, at the Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

A year ago the Test Site was declared a national repository for low-level radioactive and chemical wastes -- called mixed wastes -- along with Hanford, Wash., Gertz said.

The DOE needs a permit from the state, because hazardous, toxic chemicals fall under Nevada environmental responsibility, division spokesman John Walker said.

How much waste is Nevada expecting?

"That's the $64,000 question," Walker said. "There is no way to know."

The DOE is asking to bring up to 700,000 cubic feet of the mixed wastes, most of it from Rocky Flats, Colo., and Oak Ridge, Tenn., Harkess said. Rocky Flats processed plutonium for nuclear weapons, and Oak Ridge handled uranium for the nuclear arsenal.

The wastes coming to the Test Site will all be in solid form.

No gas or liquid hazardous or low-level nuclear wastes are allowed at the Test Site, Harkess said.

In 1997 the DOE stopped truckloads of sludge contaminated with low levels of radioactivity from its Fernald, Ohio, uranium processing plant from coming to the Test Site after six shipments arrived leaking liquid and a seventh load was noticed leaking by a truck driver near Kingman, Ariz.

A DOE investigation revealed that faulty containers allowed the liquid to leak from the Fernald sludge.

The mixed wastes are a different composition.

"There could be chromium, copper, zinc, lithium, stuff like that with the low-level radioactive wastes," Harkess said.

It could take up to two years before any of the mixed wastes arrive at the Test Site, based on the environmental review process, she said.

The Test Site appeared favorable for such mixed waste burial, because it is a remote, dry site, the DOE record said. Other sites such as Fernald, Oak Ridge or Hanford, Wash., have high water tables or nearby rivers.