New site sought for nuke waste

Benjamin Grove

Thursday, Oct. 7, 2004 | 11:18 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Spurred by lawsuit threats from Nevada, the Department of Energy has begun looking for a new place to store radioactive waste piled up in Ohio.

Nevada officials have long fought to keep the radioactive material out of the Nevada Test Site. The Energy Department had said Nevada was its "primary" disposal site for the waste at the former uranium processing plant in Fernald, Ohio.

But the department has now told cleanup contractor Fluor Fernald to look elsewhere for a dump site.

The department expects the contractor on Friday to submit a search plan for a new site, said Bill Taylor, director of the Fernald cleanup project. Department officials want to find a new site by March, he said.

In response to Nevada's objections, the department and Fluor Fernald are "opening the aperture" to seek out commercial dump sites, Taylor said.

Taylor and Energy Department spokesman Joe Davis today declined to say if the department had completely scrapped its plan to ship the waste to Nevada.

Sandoval had said he would sue the Energy Department if it tried to move thousands of truckloads of the waste from Ohio to Nevada. About 9,000 cubic yards of the material is a solid, viscous material, Taylor said. About 5,000 cubic yards is a white metallic power.

Nevada officials have argued the waste should be stored at a site regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They have said the Fernald waste is more radioactive and not the same classification as waste at the low-level test site dump.

The state had a strong case, Deputy Attorney General Marta Adams said.

"This is considered a very special kind of waste for a reason," Adams said. "The law requires that it be handled at a very specialized kind of site."

The Test Site, home to a federal government low-level radioactive waste dump, is managed by the National Nuclear Security Administration, an affiliate of the Energy Department.

The border of the 1,375-square-mile Nevada Test Site, once the nation's nuclear weapons proving ground, that is nearest to Las Vegas is about 65 miles northwest of the city.

The 1,050-acre Fernald plant, 18 miles northwest of Cincinnati, had supported the U.S. weapons programs for 37 years when it was closed in 1989.