THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, February 15, 1995 TAG: 9502150492
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY SCOTT HARPER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 79 lines
The U.S. Department of Energy is eyeing Hampton Roads as a temporary storage site for 183,000 gallons of radioactive nitric acid that once helped make nuclear weapons.
The material, mixed with an estimated 7,500 kilograms of uranium, would be held in protective containers for ``a few days to a couple weeks'' before being shipped to Great Britain, where it will be recycled, said Terry Brown, a DOE spokesman.
Hampton Roads is one of three Atlantic ports under consideration. Baltimore and Port Elizabeth, N.J., also may be offered what federal officials describe as one of the first and largest overseas shipments of radioactive acid ever.
An environmental assessment of the project, which already is drawing protest from local and international environmental groups, is expected to be released this week by federal officials.
The DOE also will hold a public hearing in Norfolk, probablylater this month or in early March, to gauge local sentiment for storing such material.
Local and federal officials interviewed Tuesday could not say where in Hampton Roads the acid would be stored.
City and port officials in Portsmouth and Norfolk were not aware of the proposed transport when contacted. And a spokesman for Newport News Shipbuilding, a favored nuclear storage facility with the Navy, said the massive shipyard is not in the running.
The material in question is radioactive nitric acid from the environmentally troubled Hanford nuclear weapons facility in Washington state.
At Hanford, the acid was spread over nuclear fuel rods, stripping away unwanted substances and metals until only plutonium was left. The plutonium was then used to build nuclear weapons at the plant.
Brown said the leftover acid is relatively mild in comparison to other radiation sources. It falls into the ``low specific activity'' category - a designation carrying few of the extra-special handling protections that other radioactive wastes require.
While many radioactive wastes are transported to disposal sites by rail, Brown said the DOE favors trucking the acid to the East Coast for shipment to Great Britain.
``It's less radioactive than natural radium,'' he said. ``If you ran into a radium mine in the Nevada desert, you'd have a higher exposure risk than with this stuff.''
That hardly is solace to the Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club, which is ``greatly concerned'' by recommendations that the acid come to Hampton Roads, said its nuclear-issues expert, Robert Deegan.
``I told them I was astounded,'' Deegan said Monday in recalling a recent discussion with energy officials in Washington state. ``Why not take this to a low-population military port? Why come to a big-population civilian port like we have here? There's just a lot of questions I have about all this.''
Greenpeace and other international groups have questions, too.
Steve Dolly, research director for the Washington-based Nuclear Control Institute, said he is upset that the U.S. government, which says it opposes nuclear proliferation, is paying a British company to take nitric acid that could be used later to help manufacture nuclear weapons.
``This is unprecedented,'' Dolly said. ``It gets the United States directly involved in something President Clinton said the country was expressly against.''
The energy department responded that the deal with British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. was a marriage of convenience. Brown said the company will get to keep all the nitric acid it recycles, and the U.S. government will get back all the uranium separated from this radioactive soup after reprocessing.
``We really can't do this (recycling) work here anymore,'' Brown said. ``So this seems like the best option we could come up with.'' ILLUSTRATION: Map
The Department of Energy wants to send 183,000 gallons of
radioactive nitric acid from Washington state to one of three ports.
The acid has been used to strip away other materials from fuel rods
in making plutonium for nuclear weapons.
KEYWORDS: RADIOACTIVE CARGO AND WASTE by CNB