SRS endangering nearby waters, report says

WASHINGTON — A scathing report on the Savannah River Site will be released today by scientists who allege that the facility is storing radioactive waste in ways that endanger the waters around the site.

Though the report contains much that is already known about the contamination of SRS, the Maryland-based Institute for Energy and Environmental Research focuses on some little-publicized concerns about the site, including the handling of two underground waste storage tanks.

“A lot of nuclear sins have been committed in the name of expediency and national security,” said Arjun Makhijani, a co-author of the report who holds a doctorate in nuclear fusion. “But this is the first time that a shallow high-level nuclear waste dump has been created in the United States.”

State and federal environmental officials who have read the report’s executive summary said they disagree with many of the Institute’s findings and reject the conclusion that SRS has created a high-level dump.

“They draw some conclusions that are in truth opinions and in many ways speculation,” said Rick Ford, spokesman for SRS.

The “dump” to which Makhijani refers is two tanks at the site’s 51-tank farm, which all together contain about 38 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste underground.

In the two tanks in question, as of 2002, most waste had been removed. But residual waste was mixed with grout — sand, gravel and cement. Then the tanks were closed; the management of the waste is considered complete.

Though SRS officials consider this mixture in the tanks “low-level” waste, their own readings show that the material exceeds the low-level waste standards, said Makhijani. He said the mixture falls into a category that requires burial in a deep federal repository.

“They have diluted away high-level waste and said it’s not high-level waste,” Makhijani said. “It is high-level waste in technical and legal terms.”

It does not make sense to treat the waste as high-level material that must be moved to a deep depository, said Ford, the SRS spokesman. “To get at that would mean to perhaps take those tanks out of the ground, section them and all of that would be a far greater exposure to the workers who would have to do it.”

He added that the Department of Energy, which oversees SRS, and the states of South Carolina and Georgia have approved the current storage method as safe.

But similar plans to handle the remaining tanks on the farm have been stymied.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, a Washington-based environmental group, has successfully challenged this storage method in court. However, the Department of Energy is trying to get Congress to pass a law to allow it to proceed.

U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett, R-S.C., whose district includes SRS, and a spokesman for U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who preceded Barrett in the 4th District seat, declined comment.

The report, which is the product of two years of research, does not focus exclusively on the two tanks or even call them the most dangerous threats posed by the Savannah River Site, which produced much of the United States’ nuclear fuel during the Cold War and is now considered one of the world’s most contaminated atomic weapons sites.

Much of the report deals with contamination of the waters in and around SRS.

Makhijani and co-author Michele Boyd assert that much of what is known about the contamination at SRS — its land and water — isn’t taken seriously enough by federal officials. For example, they write, new studies show that health risks caused by exposure to tritium have been underestimated.

Tritium contamination has been documented throughout the site and the Savannah River.

Makhijani says he still would not hesitate to drink water from SRS area taps. “We don’t want to panic the public.”

Reach Markoe at (202) 383-6023 or lmarkoe@krwashington.com Staff Writer Sammy Fretwell contributed to this report.