Wednesday, May 19, 2004 | 12:33 p.m.
WASHINGTON -- The Energy Department may be preparing to take radioactive waste out of storage silos in Ohio just to create a need to move it to Nevada, state officials allege.
Nevada threatened to sue the department last month if it did not agree to stop shipments from the Fernald Site in Ohio to the Nevada Test Site. The department said it would evaluate the planned shipments and would give Nevada 45 days' notice if it decided to move anything.
At a meeting with reporters Tuesday, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said he was not aware of any changes in the Fernald situation.
But Attorney General Brian Sandoval suspects the department will tell the state about a shipment soon because he has heard Fluor, the contractor at the Fernald Site, wants to open one of the Ohio silos to begin preparing the waste for shipment.
The silos hold the remnants of very pure uranium ores, left over from when the Fernald site was a uranium processing center, Jeff Wagner, Fluor spokesman, said. The ores also include other radioactive metals such as radium, as well as lead and even slight amounts of precious metals like gold, Wagner said.
Wagner and Gary Stegner, public affairs officer for the Energy Department at the Fernald site, each confirmed that there are department-approved plans to begin processing the waste in the silos as soon as June for shipment to Nevada. Those plans are now in limbo because of Sandoval's letter, Wagner and Stegner said.
"Until the serious legal concerns about the legitimacy of disposal of this material at the Nevada Test Site are resolved, such a precipitous action could only create a safety emergency in Ohio where none now exists," Sandoval wrote in a letter sent Tuesday to the department General Counsel Lee Liberman Otis.
"Significant public health and safety issues, including excessive radon emissions, as well as critical public policy issues, will arise from removal and storage of the material at Fernald and should be addressed for the protection of the public in both Nevada and Ohio." Sandoval's letter came as a surprise to both Fluor and Energy Department officials working at the Fernald site, as the plan to move low-level waste from Fernald to the Nevada Test Site was approved first in 1994 and then again in 2003. All stakeholders, including those in Nevada, were involved in the approval, Wagner and Stegner said.
"This hasn't been a sudden change of course, but something planned and worked on for, for over 10 years," Wagner said. "That's why it (the letter) was a surprise."
Wagner estimates that the Ohio plant has shipped about 6,000 truckloads of low-level waste to the Nevada Test Site since the 1980s. The waste from the silos, however, would have been a different type of waste than the waste Fluor has previously shipped to the Test Site.
Fluor officials had planned to extract the waste from the silos into steel containers, then would process it and dilute it with ash and concrete before packaging it in DOE approved containers for transportation and burial, Wagner said. Each container would hold approximately 20 percent waste and 80 percent ash and concrete, he said.
If Energy Department officials cannot resolve the issue with Nevada officials, it would create a safety problem at the Fernald site, Stegner said.
"We're sort of between a rock and hard place," Gary Stegner, "The neighbors and state regulators expect us to ship it out, and we can't have on-site storage. It has been in silos for 50 some years which were never meant to be permanent storage."
Stegner said the silos holding the nuclear waste are way beyond their life expectancy to hold the waste. An aquifer at the Fernald site also makes it impossible for some waste to be stored at the clean-up site.
"It's not an option to leave the waste in the silos. No action is not an option," Stegner said, adding they they are currently exploring their options after receiving the attorney general's letter.
Nevada officials, however, argue that the waste now stored in the silos is not the low-level radioactive waste that could be stored at the Test Site. Sandoval said the department does not have a clear plan for what to do with the waste so it "should not, under the present circumstances, authorize any removal of the material until the legal issues are appropriately resolved."
Nevada also filed a petition with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission asking it to order the department to stop its plans to move the waste. The petition has not been answered yet.
Sandoval also said that "huge bonuses" the department offered Fluor also concern the state, since they "should not be serving as an inducement for the company to cut corners on safety or the law."
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