Sacramento Bee
Published July 5, 1999
State Struggles With Nuclear Waste
By Carrie Peyton
Working to rock oldies in the breezy sunshine, UC Davis crews dump clear plastic bags of lab litter into an outdoor compactor.
Bee Staff WriterOn a different job, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. workers are protected by distance as they use remote equipment to ease nuclear plant filters and grainy resins into lead sheaths up to 4 inches thick.
Both are handling "low level" radioactive waste.
It may be California's most contentious -- and least understood -- garbage.
Some is so ephemeral it disappears within days.
Some is so benign people swallow it during medical tests.
And some is so dangerous that unshielded, it would deliver a fatal dose in a single hour, so durable that it will remain radioactive for tens of thousands of years.
Now, after years of bitter disputes, California is about to take a fresh look at what should be done with refuse from nuclear plants, research, industry and medicine. It will not be an easy job.
The man just appointed by Gov. Gray Davis to head a new waste task force, University of California President Richard Atkinson, is reluctant to even talk about when the group will begin meeting, who will be members or what they might do.
"President Atkinson does not want to say anything about low-level radiation in any way, shape or form," said UC spokesman Chuck McFadden.
Davis recruited Atkinson in June, after declining to appeal a federal court ruling on land ownership seen as a near-fatal blow to plans to bury four states' waste beneath the Ward Valley desert.
Opposition has delayed the 12-year-old plan for so long that limbo has evolved into a new status quo, forcing people with radioactive trash to find other options.
With an entire nuclear plant to tear apart and throw away, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District is quietly benefiting from the delay.
SMUD has been sending its pipes, tubes, condenser parts and turbine pieces to a dump in Utah that began accepting such waste only[I] [/I]a few years ago. The utility calculates that it would cost six times more to send the same garbage to Ward Valley, which current law would force it to do.
So SMUD keeps speeding up its dismantling of Rancho Seco to take advantage of the cut-rate prices.
"Everybody who could has been trying to unload their waste. . . . It's a lot cheaper than one would project if Ward Valley were on line. So they're happy," said Dr. Bob Lull, chief of nuclear medicine at San Francisco General Hospital.
Lull is a member of the Southwestern Low-Level Radioactive Waste Commission, which is supposed to oversee the four-state disposal plan created under a federal law aimed at making every region share the burden of the politically unpopular waste.
He calls it a "stupid" law. A single national site would be cheaper and scientifically more sound, but under current rules, California still must act, he said. The law also has produced few results. No region has built itself a new waste site.
Meanwhile, soaring costs have reduced California's low-level radioactive waste production.
Researchers are trying to use shorter-lived isotopes. Businesses recycle gauges and equipment. People pay to compress or burn much of what's left, to shrink waste that can cost thousands of dollars a barrel to dump.
PG&E estimates it has reduced waste 90 percent over the past decade, through changes such as taking less equipment into contaminated areas and laundering tainted clothing.
While waste volumes roll up and down, with high years in 1996 and 1997 because of military base closures, the trend in California is clearly downward, perhaps by as much as 70 percent, said Carl Lischeske, manager of the state's low-level radioactive waste program.
But new nuclear garbage is still churned out every year, by researchers, industry and especially nuclear plants. Last year, more than 80 percent of the state's low-level waste came from nuclear utilities, according to state and federal records.
Those anxious for a place to dump it have long raised the specter of waste mounting up in hospitals and research facilities, with nowhere to send it. In Sacramento and around the state, that fear has never materialized.
Sutter Roseville, like most community hospitals, uses such short-lived isotopes that it just stores them until they decay, then lumps them in with other medical trash, said Dr. Frederick Weiland. It's done things that way for 25 years.
The McClellan Nuclear Radiation Center, which runs a small reactor used for material inspection, sends all its low-level radioactive refuse to dumps in Utah and South Carolina.
Calgene, the Davis biotech firm, decays some waste on site and ships the rest -- about one barrel a year -- to South Carolina.
UC Davis decays two-thirds of the solid waste produced by its research projects. It has been letting about 40 barrels build up over the past five years until it has enough to ship eonomically, although it also may try some alternate disposal technologies.
Stanford University keeps its low-level waste around -- as a strategy to limit its legal exposure. Since it hasn't yet shipped to South Carolina, Stanford wouldn't be liable to help with cleanup if the dump there ever becomes a Superfund site.
Over the past seven years, the university has stashed away just over 100 cubic feet, which it keeps in a special locked facility, and it has room to keep doing so for years to come.
The easiest, most innocuous stuff, we've got a solution for," said Rich Gallego of Thomas Gray and Associates Inc., a Southern California firm that helps hundreds of companies around the West find ways to recycle, squish, burn and finally dispose of their radioactive rubbish.
Once every few months, Gallego said, he sees a piece of garbage that's illegal to dump anywhere in the United States -- usually a gauge or old measuring device excluded by rules at existing dumps.
Its owners just have to store it until someone changes a law.
Such problems would become more frequent if South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges follows through on a campaign pledge and bars some or all out-of-state refuse from the Barnwell, S.C., site that now takes the most hazardous low-level waste.
Gallego estimates that less than 10 percent of what comes through his firm would be affected if that happened. Statewide, said Lischeske, the figure could range between 10 percent and 25 percent.
Nuclear utilities, which produce the bulk of the most virulent low-level waste, aren't panicking.
PG&E said it has room to keep its waste on site for 50 years -- longer than its current license to operate. Southern California Edison, which runs the only other commercial nuclear plant in the state, said it has room at San Onofre to store low-level waste until its license expires in 2013.
Charles Judd, president of Envirocare, which runs the Utah disposal site, hopes his company can sidestep the entire regional compact issue. It has been searching for a location where it can begin accepting the most dangerous low-level waste.
"It's been a good business, there's no question," he said.
It is also a woefully misunderstood one.
"It's a strange animal, the low-level waste," said Gerard Wong, of the state's radioactive materials licensing unit. "People think of low as something that's not too bad. . . . It can still be pretty, pretty radioactive."