The Department of Energy's recent assurance that 99 percent of radioactive material will be removed from waste tanks at Savannah River Site should encourage Congress to allow the cleanup to proceed. It may fall short of a perfect solution -- the removal of 100 percent -- but it would go a long way toward finally dealing with highly radioactive material that has been stored on site for decades.
Under a proposal by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., liquid waste would be removed from the tanks and turned into glass logs, in preparation for shipping them to a permanent waste site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
Gov. Mark Sanford and the state Department of Health and Environmental Control support the plan. The governor has noted that, under the existing waste treatment policy, waste could remain in the tanks another 30 years.
As proposed by Sen. Graham, the cleanup would leave a relatively small amount of material, resembling a slurry, in the tanks. Because it has proven intractable to treatment in two tanks from which waste already has been removed, the slurry would be encased on site with a concrete grout, poured in and around the tanks.
Assistant Energy Secretary Jessie Roberson recently told a Senate committee that the department is confident the remaining waste left in the tanks will qualify as low-level waste once it is diluted with the grout mixture. A spokesman for the state Department of Health and Environmental Control tells us that has been the case with the two tanks already treated at SRS.
DHEC views the treatment plan as a way to finally deal with the 37 million gallons of waste in 49 tanks at the former weapons plant. DHEC Deputy Commissioner Robert King describes the existing storage as "the single most potentially hazardous condition to the environment and the people of South Carolina." Under Sen. Graham's proposal, the state would have to agree to cleanup plans for each tank, and maintain oversight of the process.
Amendments in both the House and Senate would require a National Academy of Sciences review of DOE's cleanup plan. The Senate amendment has the benefit of allowing DOE to proceed with the preliminaries while an academy review is undertaken. The provision for NAS review should act as a needed circuit breaker if DOE's plans are determined to be inadequate.
Sen. Graham's proposal has been criticized because it would allow DOE to leave radioactive waste on site. But based on the cleanup experience of two tanks on site, the level of radioactivity will be greatly diminished and will present a far less hazard in its immobilized state than the millions of gallons of high-level radioactive liquid that have long been stored in the aging tanks.
DHEC nuclear waste experts are convinced that the plan will work, and that there are adequate safeguards for the state. The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission has endorsed the idea, saying that the plan "would protect public health and safety." Sen. Graham points out that it would speed up the cleanup by 23 years and reduce the anticipated expense by some $16 billion.
If the National Academy Sciences finds a fatal flaw in the plan, it should have the opportunity to intervene, even under the timetable envisioned by the Senate. Otherwise, the long overdue cleanup of this lingering waste problem should finally commence.
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