Friday, September 03, 1999
DOE tests new ways to ship soil
Agency hears worries of Fernald neighbors
BY RACHEL MELCER
The Cincinnati Enquirer
CROSBY TOWNSHIP — Spurred by people who live and work near Fernald, the Department of Energy is investigating new ways to ship low-level radioactive waste from the former uranium processing plant to dump sites in Nevada and Utah.
Next week, 10 Dumpster-sized containers filled with contaminated soil will be loaded onto trucks at Fernald, driven to a transfer station near Pittsburgh, then moved to flatbed rail cars. Locomotives will transport the containers to Salt Lake City, Utah, where they will be moved again onto trucks and carried 80 miles to Envirocare, a commercial disposal site.
Cost, safety and schedule data from this nearly $40,000 test run will be studied by analysts at Fernald, then subject to public scrutiny and comment.
This winter, the public, DOE and site management company Fluor Daniel Fernald will decide if this “intermodal” — truck-and-train — transport is the best way to go. It could result in up to 25 percent cost savings on the multimillion-dollar shipping projects, officials said.
The first of several DOE cleanup sites nationwide to begin large-scale shipping, Fernald will move about 20 million cubic feet of radioactive and chemically contaminated waste to Envirocare and the Nevada Test Site over the next eight years.
People who live near Fernald are eager to get its hazardous byproducts out of the area. But
they are concerned with the high costs of such massive shipping operations, and worry about the safety of transporting the material on highways and byways nationwide.
Rail transportation is much safer, though not always accessible to Fernald and other of the nation's remote nuclear weapons production sites. The compromise is intermodal shipping.
“We've always been concerned, whenever anything is transported, how safe is it? How cost-effective is it?” said Jim Bierer, co-chairman of the Fernald Citizens Advisory Board (CAB). “This (test run) is a very important thing for us, because this is one of the recommendations that we have been proposing and kind of pushing DOE to do something about.”
The only similar DOE operation in the country is at the RMI extrusion plant in Ashtabula, at the northeastern corner of Ohio. Although it has a much smaller shipping program and has far less waste to transport than Fernald, RMI has demonstrated success with the intermodal approach.
“It's about half the cost of using a truck (alone) and it's about seven times safer than putting it on the road,” said Ward Best, a spokesman at the DOE Ohio field office. “Based on those two things, it was a deal we couldn't refuse.”
If Fernald should implement and have similar success with intermodal shipping, it is likely to spread to other DOE complex sites nationwide — and could save taxpayers' risk and money.
“Do I see this as the wave of the future? The truth is, I don't know. We've got to go through this (test run) and evaluation this winter,” said Terry Hagen, Fluor Daniel Fernald's director of strategic planning.
Although the test run is being conducted on the Fernald-to-Utah route, that program is not likely to switch from its rail-only shipments. Trains were bought and tracks extended to Fernald specifically for that program, which is just beginning to gather steam.
Instead, intermodal transportation could replace truck-only shipments of radioactive waste from Fernald to the Nevada Test Site north of Las Vegas.
That run has been plagued with problems since a December 1996 leak from a “white box” full of waste near Kingman, Ariz. The program was shut down, investigated and fixed before it was able to restart in June. People living in Nevada complained about shipments running through downtown Las Vegas and over the Hoover Dam, so the trucks were rerouted.
And proposals for intermodal transportation were sidetracked by a highly politicized argument over construction of a Nevada train-to-truck transfer station. Nevada officials worried that it could open the door to high-level radioactive waste disposal in their state.
Still, DOE hired a firm to study the feasibility of intermodal low-level waste shipping from Fernald to Nevada. That report is due this fall, as is the analysis of this week's test run — which is being conducted on the Ohio-to-Utah route both because of the type of waste involved and to avoid the Nevada controversy.
“The populace out there in Utah and the political structure are just a lot more accepting of what Envirocare is doing than perhaps we have seen in Nevada,” Mr. Hagen said.
Preliminary estimates indicate the savings could be considerable: Moving a single container by truck to the Nevada Test Site costs between $4,200 and $4,500. With intermodal transport, six containers could be shipped for less than $4,000. And Fernald will send an estimated 15 containers to Nevada each week through 2008.
The Fernald CAB, Fluor Daniel Fernald and DOE officials said they will communicate with Nevada residents and leaders before making any final decisions. But if all goes well, intermodal transport could end up proving a safer and cheaper way to move Fernald waste.
“Eventually, that's what we'd like to see,” said Bob Danner, DOE low-level waste project manager at Fernald. “It's going to give us another option.”
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