THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 19, 1995 TAG: 9502180273
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J4 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 45 lines
``Radioactive acid may stop in Hampton Roads,'' screamed a recent headline in this paper.
We'd rather the radioactive acid stop at some other port.
Maybe we're being nervous Nellies to concern ourselves with the radioactivity: Quite possibly the 183,000 gallons of acid would kill someone before the 7,500 kilograms of uranium mixed in had any effect. In fact, Hampton Roads has successfully handled much hotter material.
Still, Robert Deegan, the Sierra Club nuclear-issues expert, asked federal energy officials two questions that make sense to us: ``Why not take this to a low-population military port? Why come to a big-population civilian port like we have here?''
The U.S. Department of Energy is considering temporarily storing here - or possibly Baltimore or Port Elizabeth, N.J. - acid that once was spread over nuclear fuel rods to strip away unwanted substances and metals, leaving only plutonium.
The acid will be trucked from the Hanford nuclear-weapons facility in Washington state to an East Coast port for storing ``a few days to a couple weeks,'' said Terry Brown, a DOE spokesman. No one's saying where the radioactive soup would be stored here, if it came here.
The acid is to be shipped to Great Britain, where British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. plans to separate the acid and uranium. The company will keep the nitric acid and return the uranium to the United States.
Obviously Hampton Roads has no cause to panic. ``It's less radioactive than natural radium,'' said Brown. ``If you ran into a radium mine in the Nevada desert, you'd have a higher exposure risk than with this stuff.''
But Hampton Roads wasn't planning to run into a radium mine.
Take the radioactive acid to a lightly populated port, as the Sierra Club expert recommends.
Furthermore, trucking radioactive acid across the continent is not the best idea we ever heard. They must have ships on the West Coast. by CNB