Edition: U.S. / Global

Factory Is Set to Process Dangerous Nuclear Waste

Published: March 13, 1996

For the first time since the beginning of the atomic age, the United States has opened a factory to package the worst waste from nuclear weapons production in a form that is intended to be safe for the long term.

In a ceremony here today, Energy Secretary Hazel R. O'Leary opened the Defense Waste Processing Facility, where liquid waste that has been stored in deteriorating steel tanks will be solidified into high-strength, radiation-absorbing glass.

The newly repackaged radioactive waste will have to be stored for thousands of years, and Government officials still do not have a permanent site for it. But for the foreseeable future, they say, the poisonous waste will no longer be able to leak into the soil. And once it is mixed with the glass, there is no chance of a chemical explosion. Waste from similar nuclear processes exploded in the Soviet Union in the late 1950's.

The processing plant is at the Savannah River site, the Government complex outside Aiken that was a major production site for weapons materials. Workers at the plant will mix deadly radioactive goo with molten glass, pour it into stainless-steel cylindrical logs 10 feet high and 2 feet in diameter, and seal the cylinders with a huge jolt of electricity.

Mrs. O'Leary started the operation by pushing a button in the control room that sent steam to heat a tank of waste, triggering the chemical reactions to prepare it for mixing with glass.

Mrs. O'Leary said that the plant would "create a new legacy from the cold war," a legacy of environmentally responsible handling of dangerous materials. She said the new plant, which has cost $2.4 billion to date, was "the largest waste-processing facility in the world."

The waste will be just as deadly locked into glass it was as a liquid, but it will be much easier to handle. "What we have now is more like a cup of water -- if you spill it, it'll be all over the place," said Robert M. Hoeppel, a control room supervisor. "When we're finished, it will be like ice -- you can pick it right back up."

The plant, with a staff of 750, will cost about $200 million a year to run and produce about one log per day, if all goes as planned. Based on the cost of designing and building the plant and training the workers, each of the glass logs produced over the life of the plant will cost $1.4 million.

The plant will process the waste at the rate of a quart or two a minute, so officials estimate that it will take 25 years to lock the 36 million gallons of waste at the site into glass. The waste, held in 51 underground tanks, will be somewhat concentrated by chemical means. Some of the less dangerous liquid will be pumped off and immobilized by using it to make huge concrete storage blocks.

It has taken more than a decade to move the waste-processing plant from the planning stage to operation. Begun in 1983, the factory was dedicated in 1990, but it has faced problems large and small since then.

For example, the control room was built with 13,000 separate alarms, but outside safety analysts said having so many alarms would simply overwhelm the operators. The plant now has about 400.

The analysts, from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, an independent agency created by Congress to look over the Energy Department's shoulder, also found that the emergency lights could fail in an earthquake; now plant workers wear little flashlights on strings around their necks. Earthquakes are a worry here because much of Charleston was damaged by one in 1886.

Major problems have already been overcome. The tanks, some holding over one million gallons, were not designed to be emptied, so it takes high-pressure water jets and mixing pumps, at a cost of $18 million per tank, to loosen the contents and get them flowing in a pipeline three-quarters of a mile long.

But other problems await. The tanks are covered at the bottom with a thick, brown sludge, which engineers say they can handle. But above that is a combination of salt and liquid that they want to concentrate before sending to the factory, and the chemicals they want to use for the job have produced unexpectedly large quantities of hydrogen, benzene and ammonium nitrate, chemicals that can explode or burn. Engineers have had to re-design systems for handling them.

There is at least three years of work ahead handling the sludge. But for the liquid above the sludge, the engineers "may have to find a different approach" because of the danger of chemical explosions or fires, said Virgil Conway, the chairman of the safety board, after a public hearing here on Monday night to discuss safety issues.

But leaving the waste in place could be far worse. Waste similar to that here exploded in the Ural Mountains in the late 1950's, rendering thousands of acres uninhabitable for years to come. Here at Savannah River, one tank has leaked and others are cracking.

If the factory here works well, the Government will build a similar plant at its Hanford site, in western Washington State. It is already working on a similar plant in West Valley, N.Y., near Buffalo, for waste left over from a poorly conceived civilian nuclear project. "Somebody needs to push the button at West Valley this year," Mrs. O'Leary said today.

But outside experts say there is still much that could go wrong. No one is sure how long the glass-melting machine will last, for example, and engineers here chose to build a single big machine, rather than two or three smaller ones, so all operations will cease when it is worn out. The Energy Department says the machine is designed to last three years, but the department hopes that it will last five years and that it can be replaced in six months.

Any work here is cumbersome. The factory is designed as a marvel of automation, and it had better be, if it is to continue working, because within about three weeks, most working parts will be contaminated beyond what humans can come into contact with.

When the cylinders are filled, so much radiation will penetrate the steel that a person next to one would accumulate a lethal dose in minutes. So all repairs in the factory will have to be done by remote control.

Clint Oglesby, sitting at a control panel with 10 joysticks for manipulating cranes and cameras, said an operator would see what was going on only through television cameras, "and he'll only see nine inches at a time." The work, he said, will be a bit like building a ship in a bottle.

But for all the expense and difficulty, the factory could do more than protect the environment if it works well; it could also be a tool for disposing of surplus plutonium from weapons, experts say.

The grand plan is to bury the cylindrical logs in a national nuclear-waste repository planned for Yucca Mountain, northwest of Las Vegas, Nev. But because of scientific problems and political opposition, it is far from clear whether that repository will ever open. In the meantime, the cylinders will be stored here.

To maximize the chance that they will stay intact for thousands of years, the stainless steel is handled only by machines or by gloved hands. At the ceremony today, rows of empty casks were labeled with warnings not to touch; chemists say that even the salt in a sweaty palm could begin corroding the stainless steel, which is three-eighths of an inch thick.

Photo: At the Government's Savannah River complex, near Aiken, S.C.,stainless-steel cylinders stand ready to encase deadly waste from nuclear weapons work. The waste will be mixed with molten glass and poured in. (Alan S. Weiner for The New York Times)