Thursday, May 13, 1999
Fernald getting rid of uranium wastes
Rail cars make 1st round trip
BY RACHEL MELCER
The Cincinnati Enquirer
CROSBY TOWNSHIP — IT Corp. is getting ready to turn up the heat at Fernald. The Pittsburgh-based company, responsible for moving 1 million tons of low-level radioactive waste from the former uranium processing plant to a Clive, Utah, dump over the next five years, is already loading rail cars and sending them on their way.
The first successful round-trip ended when a clean and empty train chugged back into Fernald on Wednesday afternoon.
Area residents and activists say the shipping program, so far, is on the right track. They are relieved to see the waste that built up over nearly 40 years of Cold War-era production leaving their back yards.
But IT Corp. has not yet scratched the surface.
“We're off to a good start,” said company project manager Con Murphy.
More than 60 community members toured Fernald on Tuesday evening and got an eyeful of the company's massive, $25 million dryer and shipping facility. It was built over winter months by local union members and should be fully operational in mid-
July.
When the project is under full steam, 130 specially trained employees, culled from the community and Fernald's existing work force, will labor around the clock, five days a week through 2004.
Wearing respirators and other protective gear, they will dig loads of uranium- and thorium-contaminated waste out of seven on-site dump pits. Wet and dry piles will be crushed and combined to a 35 percent-liquid muck
that will be fed into two massive dryers.
When it emerges, the waste will be 15 percent liquid — not dry enough to blow away and spread contamination, and not so wet that it might leak in transit, Mr. Murphy explained. The two 1,400-degree heaters will evaporate eight tons of water per hour.
Department of Energy (DOE) officials learned their leaking lesson in December 1997, when a white container full of contaminated waste drained in transit near Kingman, Ariz. That shipping program, in which debris and radioactive dirt was trucked to a Nevada Test Site dump, was shut down after the leak and has not resumed. Officials are working to iron out controversial shipping routes and hope to restart next month.
So until the dryers are complete and have passed a series of tests with uncontaminated surrogate ma terial, IT Corp. is loading its rail cars with only slightly contaminated soil. The bulk of the waste — enough to fill 5,659 empty Boeing 747 aircraft — has not yet been touched.
IT Corp. has a big incentive to make the program work: It paid for all of its equipment up front and will be reimbursed as the waste is successfully shipped. During the first three years, the company will earn $20,000 per rail car to recoup its capital costs.
“It makes everybody a little more accountable,” said Steve Wentzel, Fluor Daniel Fernald's site manager.
Fernald is blazing a trail for cross-country, low-level radioactive waste shipments from DOE-run former nuclear weapons production sites. Officials at other locations are watching and will discuss shipping progress during a workshop at Fernald May 20-22.
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