Uranium Mines Dot Navajo Land, Neglected and Still Perilous

Excerpt from an article in

The New York Times

Sunday, April 01, 2012

Uranium Mines Dot Navajo Land, Neglected and Still Perilous

By LESLIE MACMILLAN

CAMERON, Ariz. — In the summer of 2010, a Navajo cattle rancher named Larry Gordy stumbled upon an abandoned uranium mine in the middle of his grazing land and figured he had better call in the feds. Engineers from the Environmental Protection Agency arrived a few months later, Geiger counters in hand, and found radioactivity levels that buried the needles on their equipment.

The abandoned mine here, about 60 miles east of the Grand Canyon, joins the list of hundreds of such sites identified across the 27,000 square miles of Navajo territory in Arizona, Utah and New Mexico that are the legacy of shoddy mining practices and federal neglect. From the 1940s through the 1980s, the mines supplied critical materials to the nation’s nuclear weapons program.

For years, unsuspecting Navajos inhaled radioactive dust and drank contaminated well water. Many of them became sick with cancer and other diseases.

The radioactivity at the former mine is said to measure one million counts per minute, translating to a human dose that scientists say can lead directly to malignant tumors and other serious health damage, according to Lee Greer, a biologist at La Sierra University in Riverside, Calif. Two days of exposure at the Cameron site would expose a person to more external radiation than the Nuclear Regulatory Commission considers safe for an entire year.

The E.P.A. filed a report on the rancher’s find early last year and pledged to continue its environmental review. But there are still no warning signs or fencing around the secluded and decaying site. Crushed beer cans and spent shell casings dot the ground, revealing that the old mine has become a sort of toxic playground.

News release from DOE's Office of Environmental Management:

Savannah River Site Contractor Achieves Tank Waste Milestone

AIKEN, S.C. – The Savannah River Site’s liquid waste contractor recently achieved a contract milestone by processing 500,000 gallons of salt waste in underground tanks for disposition since October last year.

“I congratulate Savannah River Remediation (SRR) for reaching this initial milestone,” said Terrel Spears, Assistant Manager for Waste Disposition Project, DOE Savannah River Operations. “Processing salt waste is essential for us and our mission to close tanks. The salt processing technologies utilized have proven very effective in removing the radioactive constituents from salt waste and the processing rates being achieved are encouraging.”

A second SRR contract milestone calls for an additional 450,000 gallons of salt waste to be processed by the end of September this year. SRR has processed more than 2.5 million gallons of salt waste for disposition since 2008.

---

Pictured here is a component of the Interim Salt Disposition Process — known as Modular Caustic Side Solvent Extraction Unit (MCU) — that helped Savannah River Remediation process more than 500,000 gallons of salt waste since October last year, a contract milestone.

---

SRR operates the Interim Salt Disposition Process (ISDP) to prepare the salt waste for disposition. The ISDP is being used temporarily until that work can be completed by the Salt Waste Processing Facility, which is being constructed.

In the ISDP, radioactive isotopes are removed from the salt waste solutions in the tanks. The chemical isotopes removed include cesium, plutonium and strontium. Those isotopes are transferred to the Defense Waste Processing Facility, where they are mixed with molten glass and placed in stainless steel canisters for permanent storage. The remaining low-level salt solution is converted into a grout-cement mixture at the Saltstone facilities and pumped into concrete vaults for permanent disposal. 

Dave Olson, SRR President and Project Manager, said salt waste constitutes 90 percent of the total waste inventory stored in SRS’s two tank farms, and the removal and processing of the salt waste is key to SRR achieving its mission to close the tanks.

“The milestone demonstrates the safe and continuous operations of a key component in the waste removal process at SRS,” Olson said.

Tenth Technology Readiness Assessment

From the U.S. Dept. of Energy, Office of Environmental Management:

EM Performs Tenth Technology Readiness Assessment

WASHINGTON, D.C. – EM recently completed its tenth Technology Readiness Assessment (TRA) since piloting the TRA process in 2006.

A TRA is an intensive peer review process through which the maturity of a technology is evaluated. A TRA utilizes the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) scale pioneered by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and adopted by the United States Air Force and other government organizations, including EM. The project uses the results of the TRA to develop a Technology Maturation Plan (TMP), which details the steps necessary to mature the technology to the level at which it can be deployed. 

The EM TRAs to date have focused primarily on technologies to accomplish one of EM’s most pressing concerns: treatment of radioactive waste in aging waste tanks at the Savannah River, Hanford and Idaho sites.

The most recent TRA evaluated Small Column Ion Exchange (SCIX), which is a sorbent column system being developed at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina to remove cesium, strontium and select actinides from radioactive salt solutions in waste tanks. With a capacity to process 2.5 million gallons of salt waste annually, SCIX may supplement operations at the Salt Waste Processing Facility under construction at SRS, markedly shortening the life cycle and reducing the risk and cost of tank waste processing.

---

Employees with Savannah River Remediation, the SRS liquid waste contractor, review mock-ups of the SCIX technology at the Savannah River National Laboratory.

---

This technology development work at SRS may be used to support treatment operations at other sites.

A TRA team consists of experts in appropriate disciplines who are not involved in development of the technology being evaluated or in the project in which the technology may be deployed.

Hoyt Johnson, EM TRA lead, pointed out that the TRA has evolved from an audit-like process to a more effective collaborative effort in which both the TRA and site teams identify solutions to eliminate gaps in the technology’s development.

“Part of the success of the TRA is the ability of the site team to understand TRA and implement it as a self-assessment. This was exemplified by the SCIX site team’s use of the External Technical Review process at inception, followed by site-level assessment of the technology maturity, resulting in a mature SCIX Technology Maturation Plan available for review when the EM TRA team arrived.” Johnson said. “Sites have become tuned in and more knowledgeable.” 

Funding constraints in 2012 have resulted in SCIX development activities being placed on hold. In preparation for resumed funding, the TRA team developed a list of prioritized recommendations for maturing the technologies so that the most effectual and expeditious use of funding is made as it is released, whether incrementally or all at once. 

TRAs and TMPs have proven to be effective management tools for reducing technical risk and minimizing potential cost increases and schedule delays. In addition to the TRAs of technologies for tank waste treatment, EM hopes to complete assessments for technologies used in other work, such as decontamination and demolition and soil and groundwater remediation.

EM issued the U.S. DOE Office of Environmental Management TRA/TMP Process Guide in 2008. A revised guide, scheduled to be issued in March, incorporates lessons learned from implementing the TRA process, recognizes the use of the process for areas in addition to tank waste and is more user friendly for site and headquarters review teams.  

Complete details concerning all of EM’s TRAs, including summaries and final reports, can be found here.

Savannah River Site 2012 Outlook

From the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Environmental Management:

Savannah River Site 2012 Outlook: Transuranic Waste Program Set to Safely Reach Milestone

New initiatives, bigger shipping containers and highly trained, innovative workers combine in milestone year

AIKEN, S.C. – In 2012, the Savannah River Site (SRS) is scheduled to achieve a milestone by completing processing of 5,000 cubic meters of legacy transuranic (TRU) waste for shipment to a safe, permanent disposal facility.

A large portion of that waste — a byproduct of nuclear defense program research and weapons production — has already been shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico. The site will continue shipments until the remaining inventory is removed. Following the scheduled completion of processing the 5,000 cubic meters of TRU waste later this year, only 200 additional cubic meters of TRU waste will remain at SRS for treatment.

“By the end of 2012, we will have remediated, repackaged and certified for shipment all but 200 cubic meters of transuranic waste at SRS, meeting a vitally important milestone for our site-wide cleanup program,” said David Moody, DOE’s Savannah River Operations Office Manager. “This means that over 95 percent of our legacy TRU waste will soon be gone from South Carolina for long-term storage at the DOE Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico, leaving a very small amount that will require some special treatment.”

TRU Waste Processing Enters New Phase

According to John Gilmour, Solid Waste Director at Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), the SRS management and operations contractor, success in the TRU program has resulted from several factors. New, larger TRUPACT-III shipping containers eliminate much of the need to manually reduce in size numerous, large pieces of TRU waste, saving time and minimizing employee exposure to radioactive materials, primarily plutonium-238. Plutonium-238 was once used as a heat source to generate power for deep space missions.

---

By May, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions expects to be shipping transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant almost continuously, using six TRUPACT-III shipping containers like the one shown here.

---

"By May, we’ll have six TRUPACT-III shipping containers available and the shipping process to WIPP will be almost continuous,” said Gilmour. “Our highly trained and talented workforce has learned to quickly recognize and productively respond to variables found when working with legacy radioactive waste materials.”

Each TRUPACT-III container can hold up to 6.6 cubic meters of TRU waste.

New Mission Takes Shape

A new SRS mission involves use of a previously unused portion of H Canyon to process and repackage plutonium (Pu) oxide.

Most of the Pu oxide in the U.S. has been consolidated at SRS and will eventually go to U.S. commercial power reactors in the form of new fuel rods. However, the relatively small percentage of Pu oxide at SRS without the properties needed for use as commercial reactor fuel will be packaged in rigorously tested containers for shipment to WIPP by SRNS Solid Waste personnel in 2012.  

“Over 100 of these specially designed metal containers, known as Pipe Overpack Containers, or POCs, have already been loaded with Pu oxide,” said Gilmour. “H Canyon has enough Pu oxide to safely fill approximately 600 of these new containers during the current campaign and potentially thousands in the future.”

According to Gilmour, once the project moves to full-production mode next year, he expects to see two to three shipments of unusable Pu oxide leave the site each week, bound for WIPP. Each truckload of waste will contain 35 POCs.

---

Workers relocate a pipe overpack container used to transport small amounts of excess plutonium oxide destined for long-term storage at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico.

---

2012 Holds Great Potential for Waste Remediation at SRS

In the past, SRS had a large amount of radioactive material stored in a variety of containers. “This waste would have been here a long time if it hadn’t been for American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding,” said Gilmour. “It’s going to be a very busy year for SRNS as we safely prepare and send out shipment after shipment of TRU waste and excess plutonium to New Mexico.”

H Canyon is the only active nuclear chemical separations facility still operating in the U.S.