Radioactive waste mounts at Test Site

Suzanne Struglinski

Tuesday, April 20, 2004 | 11:06 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- While the fight to keep high-level nuclear waste out of Nevada continues, two massive pits of low-level radioactive waste are already piling up at the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The Energy Department ships contaminated material known as "legacy waste" from former nuclear weapons plants across the country to the Test Site, which now holds about 29.7 million cubic feet of low-level waste, enough to fill almost 277 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Since October 1,287 shipments have come to the site, but the number of shipments vary from year to year. The program has been overshadowed by debate over the federal government's plan to ship high-level nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain, which borders the Test Site.

The types of waste in those plans are different.

Nevada is spending millions of dollars to fight the plan to ship 77,000 tons of high-level waste -- used reactor fuel -- from commercial nuclear reactors and government sites to Yucca, which is 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

While fighting the Yucca Mountain plan, Nevada has tolerated most of the low-level shipments to the Test Site, until now.

Attorney General Brian Sandoval says he will sue the federal government if it does not stop a plan to move waste from the Fernald site in Ohio to Nevada.

Nevada officials are arguing that the 153 million pounds of waste now stored in silos at Fernald cannot legally come to the Test Site based on state and federal laws and the department's own rules. The state says the waste is more radioactive than the department has classified it.

The Energy Department said the waste can be moved to the Test Site and has no plans to stop shipments from starting next month as planned.

"We don't agree with the attorney general's office contention," Energy Department spokesman Joe Davis said. "We will continue to move forward. Just like Yucca Mountain, if someone wants to file a lawsuit, we can't control that. We are just trying to do our job."

Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Office of Nuclear Projects, said the state will wait for a formal response from the department before making any decision to move forward with the lawsuit.

The Test Site, which is where the country tested atomic weapons for several decades, started collecting low-level waste in 1961, gathering contaminated equipment from tests at the site, and started taking the waste from other places around the country in 1976.

By October, the Test Site is expected to get another 3.5 million cubic feet of waste, among the 6.3 million cubic feet anticipated through 2009. The department, which has been taking the waste since 1976, expects to take waste until 2021, although an exact amount of how much waste it will take is not available, according to the department.

The waste contains items that were contaminated by radiation, including workers' clothes, tools, soil, trash and remains of buildings, and has a low level of radioactivity.

The waste is put in pits, and in some cases, craters from above-ground nuclear tests, and then covered with dirt.

Material classified as high-level waste, transuranic waste, spent nuclear fuel or byproduct material such as uranium mill tailings are not included in the low-level labeling.

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, better known as WIPP, in New Mexico, holds transuranic waste or materials contaminated with radioactive elements plutonium, americium, curium and neptunium. The waste is not only the actual elements but also tool, soils, protective suits and other items contaminated by them.

The Test Site sent seven shipments of transuranic waste to WIPP in January, the beginning of 60 shipments planned for this year. About 1,650 drums of the transuranic or mid-level radioactive waste will need to be moved from the Test Site over the next several years. Some of the waste is similar to what is stored at the Test Site but has a higher radiation level that the site can not dispose of properly.

The state sued the department in 1994, saying the department needed to do a new Environmental Impact Statement for the Test Site if it was going to move it from weapons testing to a disposal facility. The department and the state eventually reached a settlement in April 1997. Nevada dropped the cases and the department agreed to a performance assessment and consultations with the Interior Department on what it could do with the waste.

In 2000 the department decided to allow all former nuclear weapons plants to ship low-level waste to the Test Site or the Hanford Site in Washington. Most of the material has ended up in Nevada since the overdue cleanup of the Hanford Site and a series of lawsuits have kept new waste from entering Washington, Loux said.

Through "handshake agreements" based on this decision, shipments to Nevada are supposed to avoid Hoover Dam and heavily populated areas, including Las Vegas, Loux said. A map of transportation routes shows a variety of different routes with one route coming north on Interstate 15, west on State Route 160 -- Blue Diamond Road -- and up to the Test Site.

The department and Nevada also agreed on a 50-cent-per-cubic-foot "tipping fee" on waste brought to the state. The money collected goes to emergency management and local governments to train emergency crews in handling a spill. The department is also supposed to give $500,000 a year to the state's cancer registry, which it is not doing, Loux said.

Typically the state cannot do much to stop the shipments from coming in because low-level waste being transported from one Energy Department site to another is regulated only by the department and not state or federal laws under the Atomic Energy Act, Loux said.

"We would if we could," Loux said. "We realize we can't stop it."

Marta Adams, a Nevada senior deputy attorney general, agreed, saying the low-level waste does not fall under the state's hazardous material laws or federal hazardous material rules.

As of 2003 the department has 26 sites that can ship waste to the Test Site, with eight additional sites that can ship waste as needed, according to the department.

Drums and boxes of waste get buried in Area 5 at the Test Site. The area spans 732 acres, only 92 of which are used right now. The area is 770 feet above the groundwater. The department stacks the boxes and orders the boxes in a grid system of cells and covers it with eight feet of soil.

Area 3 at the Test Site spans 128 acres and is 1,600 feet above the groundwater. The department uses large craters formed by underground nuclear weapons testing to bury larger contaminated items like shipping containers and other equipment. Layers of waste get separated by one to three feet of soil.

"This stuff is pretty much just dumped," said Don Hancock, director of nuclear waste programs at the Southwest Research and Information Center in Albuquerque, N.M. "When you are talking about radionuclides, they are going to be around for a very long time. Just to say Nevada is a desert and nothing bad is going to happen is wrong."

Hancock said there is a lot of waste the department has to deal with and it is running out of places to put it.

"To assume everything is going to be fine is something DOE (the Energy Department) may be willing to do, but something citizens should be skeptical about," Hancock said.

He said the stored waste could not explode but may not necessarily decay away. It is hard to say what is going to happen years from now.

"Nevada doesn't want to be the nation's dump for everything," Hancock said. "The burden should be shared better."