Nuclear Refuse Piles Up; Dump Site Is Delayed

At the Idaho border, uniformed troopers turn back shipments of nuclear waste from defense plants around the country. With 120,000 barrels of radioactive refuse already stacked in the Idaho desert, Gov. Cecil D. Andrus figures his state has done its patriotic duty.

“I’m not in the garbage business anymore,” he declares.

At the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado, where much of the unwanted plutonium-contaminated trash is generated, seven armored boxcars filled with the low-level to intermediate-level solid waste wait for a destination. It has been more than a month since Idaho issued its moratorium, and Colorado Gov. Roy Romer has vowed that he will shut Rocky Flats down before he lets it become a de facto dump just 16 miles from downtown Denver.

The billion-dollar solution to this stalemate lies half a mile beneath the hostile desert of southeastern New Mexico, where caverns are being mined into ancient rock salt beds to form what is supposed to be the nation’s first permanent nuclear dump.

The Department of Energy hopes the salt caverns being created at its Waste Isolation Pilot Plant--known by its initials, WIPP--will safely entomb the drums of contaminated rags, tools, gloves, papers and other solid transuranic trash for at least 10,000 years.

Transuranic or “TRU” waste is any material contaminated by man-made radioactive elements, such as plutonium, having atomic numbers greater than uranium. Rocky Flats generates 65% to 70% of such waste in the nation.

If WIPP becomes operational, it should take 25 years to fill the repository’s 56 rooms to capacity with 6 million cubic feet of waste in 330,000 barrels. The caverns would be back-filled with the mined salt, which eventually would encase the waste and form a tomb for it. Scientists say the rock-hard salt is the legacy of an ancient sea that evaporated about 220 million years ago.

But the New Mexico pilot plant’s scheduled Oct. 1 opening has been postponed by bureaucratic and legislative hurdles as well as by environmental and health concerns. Now the plant will not open until at least mid-June, and where to store the mounting waste until then is an unanswered question.

Temporary dumps such as the one at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory near Idaho Falls are rebelling against taking more waste, and the Department of Energy readily admits that it has no long-term alternative should WIPP eventually fail.

The New Mexico facility still has a number of obstacles to surmount.

First, it must prove that brine seeping into the salt repositories will not harm the double-steel, 55-gallon barrels holding the waste when it is buried. Questions also have been raised about possible leaks from aquifers both above and below the site; environmentalists worry that such underground water could create a radioactive slurry when mixed with the salt, rock and entombed waste, posing a potential threat to local water supplies. WIPP officials dispute such suggestions, pointing out that the salt beds are so dry that miners excavating the repository must sprinkle water in the tunnels to keep the dust down. No standing water or dampness is evident inside the 11 miles of tunnels and rooms excavated to date.

Other Conditions

The plant, which will extend for 25 to 30 miles underground when finished, must also:

--Meet health and safety standards for a permanent repository. These guidelines are still being drafted by the Environmental Protection Agency.

--Receive congressional approval to withdraw 10,000 acres of federal land surrounding the site from public use, transferring the deed from the Interior Department to the Department of Energy.

--Obtain certification from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of the containers that will be used to ship the barrels of waste across the country.

--Develop a plan of operation that includes detailed proposals for any experiments WIPP wants to conduct on transuranic wastes.

“They really haven’t developed a plan that would demonstrate what they would do if there was a problem--where they would put the waste, how much would be stored elsewhere. . . .” said Keith Fultz, an associate director at the federal government’s General Accounting Office.

The GAO told a House subcommittee in September that the WIPP was not ready to become operational. The Energy Department agreed that it could not yet prove that the plant was safe.

‘Nothing Is 100%’

“I wish we could tell people we guarantee this 100%, but, hey, we can’t. Nothing is 100%. Not even the air we breathe,” said Tarek Khreis, the WIPP spokesman for Westinghouse, the chief contractor for the project.

“This is not just a hole in the ground here. This is a well-thought-out project,” Khreis continued. “It’s not something drawn on napkins by two scientists having dinner.”

When WIPP missed its Oct. 1 target date to open, Gov. Andrus dispatched uniformed troopers to turn away a boxcar of Rocky Flats waste at the Idaho border. A truck hauling a similar load from Illinois was also refused entry.

“We’ve been lied to too many times,” Andrus complained.

The federal government promised Idaho nearly 20 years ago that all the atomic waste buried there would be excavated and moved out by the end of the 1970s, he said. “The end of the decade came and went and nothing was done. In the meantime, we said no more burying of waste in Idaho, and they moved to above-ground storage.

“I don’t have any fear of that getting away from us,” Andrus said, “except it continues to build and build and build. We in Idaho, being good citizens and loyal Americans wanting to help out the national defense effort, said: ‘OK, we’ll continue to let you bring it in and store it above ground.’

A Lot of ‘Hot’ Waste

“Now we have a hot 2.4 million cubic feet stored above ground. That’s 120,000 barrels in 11,000 crates. That is a whole lot of radioactive waste.”

The plan is for the New Mexico waste plant to take Idaho’s transuranic stockpile and relieve it entirely of the future burden from Rocky Flats, which manufactures the small atomic-bomb triggers for nuclear warheads.

Very Long Life

“It is mid-level contamination but it has a very long life,” said Jim Bickel, a Department of Energy assistant manager of projects and energy programs in the Albuquerque operations office.

“You could take a 55-gallon drum of TRU waste, hug it for 24 hours and get the equivalent of a chest X-ray,” he said.

Such reassurances do little to appease Roy Romer. The Colorado governor has refused Energy Department requests for a new warehouse at Rocky Flats to temporarily store the TRU waste it generates until WIPP is ready.

“It’s not right to do that in a metropolitan area of 1.5 million people,” Romer said. “I want to cooperate and work with them on finding an alternative. Obviously I want us to get a solution and get it quickly.”

Officials at Rocky Flats say the facility will reach its 1,635 cubic-yard limit for temporary waste storage sometime around late February. Romer said his latest figures indicate a deadline of mid-April or early May.

Either way, there is certain to be some time gap between Rocky Flats reaching capacity and WIPP opening. As far as Romer is concerned, the situation already has reached the crisis point.

If a solution is not found soon, the governor has threatened to shut down Rocky Flats--a move that would not only hamper national defense operations but seriously hurt his own state’s ailing economy. Rocky Flats employs more than 6,000 people and is Colorado’s ninth-largest employer.

“If you can’t store it, don’t make it,” is the response from Andrus, adding that the Idaho Falls facility reached its “political capacity,” not its physical capacity, for keeping the atomic waste.

“I’m just trying to make the federal government do what it promised society it would do several decades ago,” Andrus said. “Idaho is no longer going to be the country bumpkin they can always turn to to bail them out of their problems.”

Rural Parking Areas

Romer has suggested loading the Rocky Flats waste into armored rail cars and parking them in rural areas around the West until the salt caverns in New Mexico can be used. “Nobody else is coming up with any alternatives,” he complained.

The Energy Department is scheduled to meet Dec. 16 with Romer, Andrus and New Mexico Gov. Garrey E. Carruthers to discuss ways to handle the problem, which threatens to become a nuclear version of New York’s struggle to find a home for its infamous garbage barge.

Already there are signs that reaching a truce will not be easy.

Philip Keif, an Energy Department spokesman in Washington, said the department may turn to other defense plants to serve as foster dumps for the smaller, more urban Rocky Flats. Among those Keif mentioned as possibilities were the troubled Hanford, Wash., and Savannah River, S.C., facilities, as well as the Los Alamos plant in New Mexico.

New Mexico’s Carruthers is unlikely to agree to storing waste at Los Alamos.

“I don’t want it,” the governor said in a telephone interview from Santa Fe. “There’s no crisis in New Mexico at the moment. It sits on top of the ground at Los Alamos, so why is it better off in New Mexico than at Rocky Flats?

“There are people in New Mexico too. We’ve kept our own stuff here. Besides, you can’t get a rail car into Los Alamos, anyway--there’s no track. Our only tracks go right through Santa Fe, and if they think they’re shipping it through there, that’s an event I’d like to sell tickets to.”

Carruthers also ruled out using WIPP’s own buildings for temporary waste storage until the underground vaults are ready.

“I’m not going to turn my cheek and run nuclear waste into my state when all the conditions are not met,” he said.