State charges DOE with illegal dumping

Tuesday, July 9, 2002 | 9:48 a.m.

Nevada environmental officials have issued a violation notice to the Energy Department for sending containers of soil contaminated with both radiation and a chemical solvent from Kentucky to burial at the Nevada Test Site.

Two landfills at the Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, have accepted low-level radioactive waste from nuclear weapons activities nationwide for more than 30 years. However, radioactive wastes mixed with chemicals are not allowed.

DOE contractor Bechtel Jacobs in Paducah, Ky., discovered that 127 containers of the tainted soil shipped to a Test Site landfill were mislabeled and contain a solvent. It may cost more than $200,000 to dig up and move the dirt.

In addition to radiation, the dirt contains the toxic degreaser trichloroethene, or TCE.

Federal law sets different standards for disposing of radioactive waste combined with hazardous waste and the disposal costs are higher, because the material has to be buried at a licensed landfill.

The Energy Department operated a uranium processing plant at Paducah during the Cold War. The soils were excavated in 1991 near a drain where ditches and pipes from the processing plant emptied into creeks. Thousands of gallons of TCE poured from the industrial drain at the plant's main maintenance building until 1993, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency records said.

The boxes containing the TCE-laced dirt arrived at the Test Site in four shipments between Sept. 28, 2001, and Nov. 19, 2001, records showed.

The buried metal boxes do not pose an immediate health or environmental threat, according to Paul Liebendorfer, chief of the bureau of federal facilities in the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection.

The state issued a formal finding of "alleged violation." Steps to determine what to do with the buried soils should begin this month, Liebendorfer said.

If the government can't determine what wastes are in the soils, removing the waste for burial in a licensed landfill could begin in August.