Saturday, May 10, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

RADIOACTIVE RESIDUE: Inspectors find taint on trucks

Discoveries made at test site after deliveries of low-level nuclear waste

Waste inspectors this week found radioactive residue on two tractor-trailers that hauled tainted equipment to the Nevada Test Site from a decommissioned nuclear weapons material factory in Kentucky, authorities said Friday.

As a result, officials with the Department of Energy and a government contractor said the company in charge of environmental cleanup at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in western Kentucky has voluntarily suspended all waste shipments until an investigation is completed and corrective actions have been taken.

Greg Cook, public affairs manager for the contractor, Bechtel Jacobs Co. LLC, said the toxicity of the material, destined for disposal at the test site's low-level nuclear waste dump 75 miles northwest of Las Vegas, "was not appreciable at all and certainly not at a level that would be hazardous to people."

He said there was no indication that harmful material escaped into the environment.

"It's my understanding there was no contamination beyond the truck bed, and that this involved some isolated spots on the bed," Cook said. "This was not a situation where you had a trail of materials to the edge of the bed and then disappearing."

The level at which radioactivity was found would have been acceptable for safe transportation guidelines if the trucks had displayed appropriate placards and the tainted equipment had been marked accordingly.

"It appears we did not properly label all of the waste," Cook said.

Frank DiSanza, waste management director of the Energy Department's environmental program at the test site, said the flatbed rigs arrived Monday and Tuesday, and in both cases contamination was detected on the trucks' beds during a routine survey after their cargo had been off-loaded.

"It was above the limits that the DOT (Department of Transportation) has for us to put the truck back in commercial transit," DiSanza said in a telephone interview.

DiSanza said both trucks were decontaminated and allowed to return to Paducah.

DiSanza said a team from the Energy Department's Nevada Operations Office will travel to Paducah the week of May 19 to discuss corrective actions.

Cook said instruments measuring contact exposure showed the contaminated areas were emitting slightly higher levels than what the Department of Transportation considers acceptable for unlabeled waste material.

Cook said the location of the contaminated areas led officials to believe the contamination is linked to the 5-foot-tall, funnel-shaped bins, known as "T-hoppers," that were being transported along with other containers for disposal.

The hoppers, said Cook, were being hauled by a Kentucky-based carrier, Landstar Ranger. The hoppers had held uranium tetrafluoride, also called green salt, a crystal byproduct of the process that enriches uranium for use in nuclear bombs.

He said the hoppers probably had been used during the plant's life cycle, from 1955 to 1977. Before its decommissioning, the plant enriched uranium that then was shipped to other facilities to turn the material into nuclear fuel pellets for commercial power reactors.

Before leaving Paducah, the hoppers went through a decontamination process and then were sprayed with an adhesive that was supposed to seal remaining particles against the metal, Cook said. He said an investigation will seek to determine how and why particles came to be fixed to the trucks.

Trailers ferrying low-level radioactive waste are not required to travel fixed routes, and Cook said it was not known what roads the trucks traveled from Kentucky to Nevada.

He said he doubted the drivers will be required to map the route they took, "the reason being there's no reason at all to think there was any kind of possibility they threw off anything that could present a hazard out there."

"It's very unlikely there's anything on the roadway that could ever be identified," he said.

Sens. John Ensign, R-Nev., and Harry Reid, D -Nev., were not notified of the leak, aides said Friday.

This week's incidents were reminiscent of problems that surfaced in late 1997 when low-level nuclear waste shipments from the dismantled Fernald, Ohio, uranium foundry to the Nevada Test Site were discovered leaking.

During an 18-month suspension of waste shipments from the Fernald facility, an investigation determined that the leaking containers were made from an untested design.

Low-level radioactive waste is not to be mistaken for high-level nuclear waste and used nuclear fuel from commercial power reactors that the government plans to entomb in Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Compared with other forms, low-level radioactive wastes take a relatively short time to decay to safe levels and includes such items as research and medical materials and tainted laboratory gear, towels, rags, filters, tools and clothing.

Nevertheless, Peggy Maze Johnson, executive director of Citizen Alert, a statewide environmental group, said the waste shipping problems at the test site this week underscore the need for better accountability of Department of Energy nuclear waste operations, including its plans for a high-level waste repository at Yucca Mountain.

"Our concern has been not only that it is coming here and coming across country, but that all nuclear waste is 'iffy,' " she said.

"Maybe this was insignificant, but what kinds of safeguards are they going to have when they begin shipping high-level waste?" Maze Johnson said.