"An attempt to recover all of this waste — such as the
hardened "heel" waste attached to the inside of buried tanks at the
Hanford site in Washington state — could lead to further leaks and
contamination than if it were left in place, the report said." What
do you all think about this? -- L.P.


MSNBC
March 2, 2005
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7066394/


Department of Energy also urged to bring in outside help

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - A significant amount of radioactive waste from Cold War
bomb-making should remain at former production sites, and several
locations should be kept open longer than planned to treat waste from
elsewhere, scientists recommended Tuesday.

Reports by two panels of the National Academies urged the Energy
Department to revamp its massive $140 billion cleanup plans for
defense nuclear waste with the goal of transporting less of it to a
central facility.

This would allow cleanup activities to be completed sooner and cost
less, the panels said. The current cleanup schedule, involving dozens
of sites, envisions most waste treatment and disposal to be finished
in 20 years.

Bring other experts in, DOE urged
But the scientists also called for greater involvement outside of the
Energy Department in determining what wastes should be left in place
and what should be transported to a geological repository. The report
said the department's credibility on decisions involving waste
disposal is hampered because the DOE both proposes and approves waste
disposition plans.

"DOE should not attempt to adopt these changes unilaterally," said
the panel, suggesting the Environmental Protection Agency or Nuclear
Regulatory Commission and perhaps an independent group of experts get
involved in assessing how radioactive wastes should be treated.

This approach was applauded by some environmentalists Tuesday, who
have argued that DOE has too much power in making waste disposal
decisions. The report "clearly sent a message that Congress must rein
in DOE and address the mess that it has made of nuclear waste cleanup
policy," said Geoff Fettus, a lawyer for the Natural Resources
Defense Council.

There was no immediate reaction from the Energy Department.

Removal issue

States with some of the biggest cleanup challenges — including
Washington, Idaho and South Carolina — and have argued that high-
level defense nuclear waste should be taken away for deep geological
burial.

But a National Research Council panel, asked to review the government
program, concluded that the "recovery of every last gram" of such
waste "will be technically impractical and unnecessary."

In some cases removing waste could lead to increased human exposures
to radiation, the panel said. It also said the expense associated
with retrieval, immobilization and disposition of some of the waste
in a central repository "may be out of proportion with the risk
reduction achieved, if any."

An attempt to recover all of this waste — such as the hardened "heel"
waste attached to the inside of buried tanks at the Hanford site in
Washington state — could lead to further leaks and contamination than
if it were left in place, the report said.

Another National Research Council panel issued a companion report. It
recommended that the Energy Department use waste treatment facilities
that will handle cleanup efforts at the most contaminated sites to
treat waste from other defense sites. That would require those
facilities to stay open longer than planned.

Such use of treatment facilities at the Hanford site in Washington
state, the Savannah River complex in South Carolina, the Oak Ridge
facility in Tennessee and the Idaho National Engineering and
Environmental Laboratory in Idaho would accelerate overall cleanup
efforts, the report said.

Background to debate
How far the Energy Department should go to clean up the environmental
damage left over from decades of bomb-making and the pace of the
cleanup have sparked intense debate between the federal government
and states. State officials fear they may be burdened permanently
with waste that will be highly radioactive for thousands of years.

Citizen activists and state officials argue that the federal
government is required to remove as much of the highly radioactive
waste left over from bomb-making as is technically possible. Such
waste, they say, should go to an underground disposal site known as
WIPP in New Mexico or the Yucca Mountain high-level waste dump
proposed in the Nevada desert.

"Given the controversy surrounding this issue and the reality that
not all of the waste will or can be recovered and disposed of
offsite, the country needs a structured, well-thought-out way to
determine which wastes can stay," said David Daniel, chairman of the
panel of scientists that wrote the report on what wastes should be
exempted from deep geological burial.

The report said that techniques exist that allow the separation of
the most highly radioactive material, which would go to a central
repository, from less dangerous waste that can be processed to reduce
the potential hazard and be allowed to remain where it is.

The panel, however, acknowledged that the implementation of a
more "risk-based" approach to addressing the waste problem must be
handled with care and within current rules and the law, or risk
resistance from states.

The government must determine how best to dispose of the waste "in a
manner the public can trust," said Daniel, dean of the College of
Engineering at the University of Illinois.