Saturday, August 23, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Official wants sludge defined

Judge's ruling affects nuclear waste dump

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham has asked Congress to clarify the definition of high-level nuclear defense waste stored in three states in order to skirt a court ruling that requires his agency to dispose of it in the planned Yucca Mountain repository.

The ruling last month by U.S. District Judge Lynn Winmill in Boise, Idaho, orders the Department of Energy to remove sludge from steel tanks that are holding millions of gallons of liquid waste and prepare it for disposal in Yucca Mountain along with thousands of glass logs that will result from solidifying the highly radioactive liquids.

The mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is the only site approved for entombing spent fuel assemblies from nuclear reactors and high-level radioactive wastes left from nuclear weapons production. Those wastes are stored in steel tanks at aging production and processing sites in Washington, Idaho and South Carolina.

But the Yucca Mountain site, designed to hold 77,000 tons of material, will not be large enough to bury all of the glass logs in addition to the fuel-rod assemblies, let alone additional sludges and the dismantled tanks.

The judge's decision "has cast serious doubt on this entire strategy," Abraham wrote in an Aug. 1 letter to House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill.

Abraham said legislation he seeks would resolve what he sees as confusion created by the ruling. He said the ruling conflicts with current law that the secretary of energy, in consultation with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, can determine which nuclear weapons processing wastes require disposal as high-level radioactive waste.

"The department has long planned to dispose of this material by separating the high activity fraction of this material from the low activity fraction," Abraham said in his letter to Hastert.

The letter explains that the remainder of what is not solidified into glass logs would be disposed of as low-level radioactive waste or medium-level transuranic waste.

Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency and critic of the Department of Energy's handling of Yucca Mountain matters, said Abraham's letter "is just another case like everything that goes on at Yucca Mountain."

Rather than comply with the law or the courts, DOE's tactic is to try and change the law, Loux said by telephone Friday. "Clearly, as the district court judge says, this is all high-level waste and needs disposal and the secretary should go about his business and go along with the law as it exists rather than change it for his convenience."

According to Abraham's letter, the court's decision "also imposes significant constraints on DOE's ability to close and grout the tanks ... and may even require disposing of the tanks themselves in the repository for spent fuel."

He said the ruling's result "certainly may be decades of delay in removing the waste from the tanks, the need to dispose of far more material than any prior estimates have assumed in a deep, geologic repository, far exceeding the statutory or physical capacity of the Yucca Mountain site."

Winmill's ruling stems from a lawsuit by several groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, who claimed the Department of Energy illegally reclassified sludge that will be left in the tanks as low-level radioactive waste.

His order affects less than 2 percent of more than 90 million gallons of radioactive and hazardous chemical wastes in tanks at the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington state, the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

The Energy Department is siphoning out roughly 99 percent of the highly radioactive liquid waste and plans to turn most of it into glass.

Estimates last year showed the repository won't be able to handle all of the thousands of glass logs that will result.

That means the need for a second repository, or expansion of the one on the drawing board, is imminent, even though construction of the facility is not expected to begin until at least 2007.