SDA Volume 3, Number 3
The aim of the column is to improve the return that taxpayers get for the dollars from government and raise the level of quality of environmental science and protection. Dr. Wonk not only likes to point to areas that need improvement and correction; she also likes to point out the positive things that are going on. She believes that it is time that liberals heeded Spiro Agnew's advice to stop being "nattering nabobs of negativism."
If any of our readers have the names of executive branch officials and Congressional staff they believe should be getting advice from Dr. Wonk, please send along their names, and we will add them to our mailing list. We are sending a complementary copy to vice-president Al Gore's office so that his efforts to improve government efficiency may benefit from Dr. Wonk's long, distinguished experience.
Dr. Wonk Welcomes short letters from those in the government concerned with nuclear-weapons related issues. Letters should discuss good, bad, or ugly aspects of current policy and what out to be done to improve the latter two. Dr. Wonk may publish some of these letters, in abbreviated form.
The $100 million lesson for the DOE is: When doing something new, please try it out on a small scale first so that we know if the idea is workable.
It's a lesson that DOE does not seem to be applying to its proposed vitrification plant at Hanford. Negotiations are underway to for a large plant using a French design. I like French designs too, but in this case, the wastes that the French are vitrifying at home have a very different chemical composition from those in stored in 177 tanks at Hanford. DOE officials are aware of that.
Vitrification technology is not the main problem; we know how to make glass. The glass in question here is just like the Pyrex in your kitchen. What DOE urgently needs, and does not have, are methods to get the high-level wastes out of the tanks safely, and process them for one of two ends. Either they would be put in a dry, non-explosive form for later processing with glass or other waste form, or the treated wastes would be fed directly into a glass melter.
DOE has a long way to go to designing such treatment processes (called "pretreatment" because they would come before vitrification). Many different processes may be necessary, because wastes in various tanks have different chemical compositions. Further, independently of the number of pretreatment processes, the processing should be done in small-scale modules. That would assure that accidents, if they occur, will not produce large scale contamination. Since much of the waste is explosive, pretreatment will be more than normally dangerous. The risk of accidents is heightened by the fact that we do not know the exact composition of wastes; moreover, considerable uncertainties are likely to persist. Another advantage of small-scale treatment modules is that they can be coupled to small melters, which are relatively inexpensive, are advanced in design, have high capacity per unit melter volume, and are available in the United States.
Given the high costs of clean-up, it may well be worthwhile to extract uranium not only from materials with mine-able levels of uranium, but also from materials with far lower concentrations than the 0.2 percent that is processed as commercial ore. Yet, the DOE has never made a thorough study of the economic and environmental costs and benefits of using these wastes to displace some domestic uranium production from ore (or uranium imports). Is it because uranium mining interests might not like such a study?
It is possible that this approach may have environmental costs higher than under current processing and disposal plans; but that needs to be demonstrated in a careful study. But it is at least as likely that the current DOE approaches may result in far higher clean-up costs and greater waste disposal problems.
For instance, DOE's plan at Fernald is to make wastes in uranium pits and other wastes into glass marbles. The number of marbles will be far larger than the number of children in the world, and I presume that the DOE won't want to be handing them out. Where is the DOE going to put these billions of marbles?
Institute for Energy and Environmental Research
Comments toOutreach Coordinator: ieer@ieer.org
Takoma Park, Maryland, USA
Updated: September 1996