THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 24, 1994 TAG: 9406240545
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY CHRISTOPHER DINSMORE, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: 940624 LENGTH: Medium
Norfolk Naval Shipyard is being considered as a storage site for the spent fuel rods removed from nuclear-powered Navy ships during refueling or decommissioning, the U.S. Department of Energy announced Thursday.
{REST} Refueling occurs at both Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth and Newport News Shipbuilding. It's unclear whether the Portsmouth yard would accept wastes from Newport News.
The Portsmouth shipyard is one of several locations being considered by the DOE and the Navy as an interim storage site until a permanent nuclear waste facility is completed. DOE is trying to develop a permanent storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
The shipyard has been storing its own spent nuclear fuel for the last year while the DOE and the Navy decide what to do with it. Local environmentalists said they are surprised that the DOE may want to continuing storing spent nuclear wastes there for four decades.
The Navy would prefer not to store the fuel at the Portsmouth yard. It wants to resume sending the fuel to the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory in Idaho Falls, Idaho. It stopped sending the fuel there last summer after the DOE lost a suit brought by the state of Idaho.
The possibility that Norfolk Naval Shipyard and three other Navy yards across the country may wind up being a medium-term storage facility was disclosed in a draft environmental impact statement the DOE prepared addressing how it could deal with all its spent nuclear fuel until the permanent facility is opened.
Unlike the Navy, the DOE has expressed no preference for a particular storage option.
The DOE will make a decision next spring in a final environmental impact statement about where to send the spent fuel. Before then the public will be allowed to comment on the various options offered by the DOE.
Public hearings will be held in Portsmouth and in Newport News on July 18 for residents of Hampton Roads to voice their opinions of the proposals.
Local environmentalists are already upset that the shipyard is even being considered.
``The Sierra Club will vigorously oppose the long-term storage of spent nuclear fuels at the yards,'' said Robert Deegan, a retired Navy officer affiliated with the Sierra Club. ``The four Naval shipyards are in high population areas and we would vigorously oppose that as senseless.''
The Sierra Club advocates taking the fuel to a remote area, Deegan said.
The DOE considers the safety risks from any of the proposed storage sites minuscule, said Thomas P. Grumbly, assistant secretary for environmental management.
The risks don't amount to one additional cancer death for any of the storage options during the next 40 years, he said.
Safety risks during transportation are greater, though Grumbly said the odds for a worst-case scenario of a spent fuel spill in an urban area resulting in 50 to 60 deaths were less than one in 10 million.
Besides spent nuclear fuel from Navy ships, the DOE is responsible for spent fuel from its own reactors, research reactors, university reactors and foreign reactors using fuel provided by the United States. At issue is about 2,800 metric tons of spent fuel, only 2 percent of which is from Navy ships.
For the bulk of the spent fuel, the DOE is considering medium-term storage in sites near Aiken, S.C.; Richland, Wash.; Oak Ridge, Tenn.; and Las Vegas, in addition to the Idaho Falls facility.
The four shipyards are an added option for the Navy's spent fuel. The DOE and the Navy are also considering building a storage facility at a prototype site in West Milton, N.Y.
The DOE is also looking at how best to store the spent nuclear fuel, whether in transport casks, in immobile dry casks or in water pools.
{KEYWORDS} NUCLEAR WASTE HAZARDOUS WASTE PORTSMOUTH NAVAL SHIPYARD
by CNB