Hanford officials not waiting for Yucca outcome

Wednesday, June 6, 2001 | 9:06 a.m.

Instead of waiting for a proposed repository at Yucca Mountain to open, the Energy Department has constructed three huge underground vaults at Hanford, Wash., to hold its plutonium-laced reactor fuel and radioactive liquid wastes.

Workers in December started moving wastes, accumulated after years of building nuclear weapons, from storage pools to underground vaults that are expected to keep the wastes safe in dry casks for up to 50 years, officials said.

It's part of a larger plan to prevent contamination of the Columbia River from the former nuclear weapons plant. Already 1 million gallons of radioactive water have seeped into the ground under Hanford. Scientists are monitoring the water's movement.

The dry casks won't replace the need for a permanent repository for the waste, Hanford officials said. It just buys them time to safely move the material in solid form.

Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of the Las Vegas, is the only site being studied for such a repository. If it is found scientifically sound, it would hold 70,000 tons of spent fuel from nuclear power plants and 7,000 tons of defense waste. The earliest it would open is 2010.

However, the repository proposal could be stalled after the shift to Democratic control of the Senate. Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., who became majority leader Tuesday night, predicted last week that Yucca Mountain will not be approved.

"I think the Yucca Mountain issue is dead," Daschle said last week. "As long as we're in the majority, it's dead."

The DOE is expected to recommend next year to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham whether Yucca Mountain should become a repository.

Starting in 2007 Hanford workers will turn 53 million gallons of liquid waste -- a byproduct of reactors that processed plutonium -- into 40,000 tons of solid glass logs through a process called vitrification. The liquid is mixed with chemicals including silica and sand, then heated to create glass.

The transformation is expected to be finished by 2028, after which DOE officials hope to send the glass logs to a permanent repository.

"The waste could stay in the storage building for decades," John Briton, spokesman for Bechtel National Inc., the DOE contractor building the processing facility. "The DOE has to wait its turn until the commercial spent fuel is moved into a repository. It will take a long time before DOE waste will start arriving at Yucca Mountain."

Meanwhile, 2,300 tons of spent reactor fuel is already being moved to dry cask storage at Hanford from a 1 million-gallon pool of water, the DOE's Michael Talbot of Richland, Wash., said.

Since December, 10 shipments of the spent fuel have been put into the vaults, stored in steel tubes up to 75 feet long and 3 feet wide, surrounded by concrete with air circulating from underneath.

It will take an estimated 40 years and $40 billion paid by taxpayers to clean up Hanford's tanks, DOE spokesman Erik Olds said. He is a spokesman for the DOE's Office of River Protection, which oversees the Hanford tanks that hold the liquid waste.

The latest estimate by DOE officials for building and operating Yucca Mountain is $56 billion.

The government processed plutonium in nine reactors at Hanford for building the United States atomic weapons arsenal. The liquid wastes were stored in 177 tanks from the 1950s until the DOE started moving the waste into newer tanks in 1998.

About 1 million gallons of waste leaked into the soil from 67 older, single-walled tanks. Scientists have confirmed that the contaminated water is flowing toward the Columbia River, Olds said, which is why the DOE began in 1998 to move the waste into safer double-walled tanks.

Ironically, Hanford was also once considered as a possible site for a national nuclear waste repository. In 1987 Congress amended the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to narrow studies for a repository to Yucca Mountain.