THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, August 8, 1995 TAG: 9508080249
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY SCOTT HARPER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 114 lines
While other U.S. cities shudder at the thought of nuclear waste, Hampton Roads has grown comfortable with it, whether from Navy warships, foreign reactors or other sources.
How comfortable? Consider that a Portsmouth truck driver once parked his rig, loaded with 26,000 pounds of uranium fuel, at his house so he could shower and change shirts before driving to an Ohio nuclear plant.
Just another day at the office.
Local authorities, neighbors and environmentalists were hardly as cavalier, and company officials spent the next several days explaining that the load posed no danger, although numerous driving and safety rules were broken.
While this 1982 incident is clearly an exception, it illustrates how, decades after scientists first converted atoms to energy, Hampton Roads harbors few nuclear jitters.
It was one of the only East Coast ports to accept spent nuclear fuel rods from foreign reactors in the late 1970s and '80s. Almost every other port city barred such shipments, fearing an accident or a lawsuit from no-nuke environmental groups.
Hampton Roads also has been trained to accept radioactive materials through its long and continuing relationship with the nuclear Navy.
Historically, two of the first three test ships in the Navy's nuclear-powered fleet - the Enterprise and the Long Beach, which made their inaugural cruises in 1964 - were docked in Norfolk.
Much of the nuclear fleet was built at Newport News Shipbuilding, including nine aircraft carriers, six cruisers and some 50 nuclear submarines, according to company and Navy figures.
And local shipyards continue to service most of today's 115-vessel nuclear fleet, a tricky but lucrative chore requiring workers to unload and temporarily store tons of low-level and highly radioactive wastes.
``For so long, nuclear waste has been something that a military-industrial port like Hampton Roads has had to make the best of - sort of the price for doing this kind of business,'' said Robert Deegan, a retired Navy officer in Virginia Beach who acts as a nuclear-issues watchdog for the Sierra Club.
``It was something the whole government complex here slowly established an expertise in, whether by choice or not,'' Deegan added. ``And we're kind of stuck with that reputation.''
Despite having one of highest volumes of radioactive material in the country, no accident or harmful spill has ever occurred here, local business and shipping officials stress.
There was an incident 13 years ago when a container of radioactive material overturned in Chesapeake while being loaded onto a flatbed truck. But no radioactivity escaped and no one was injured.
Citing this record, the U.S. Department of Energy this spring selected Hampton Roads as a gateway for radioactive nitric acid, which once helped make nuclear weapons at a laboratory in Washington state. The material stays briefly at Portsmouth Marine Terminal before being shipped to England for recycling.
Soon, local ports may receive foreign fuel rods again; shipments were stopped after Deegan and the Sierra Club sued for closure in 1988 and demanded a detailed environmental risk assessment.
With that study completed this year, the government wants to end the ban and import foreign waste again. The motive: decrease the likelihood that weapons-grade material might fall into hostile hands.
While Hampton Roads is willing to accept nuclear waste and materials, and even hold them for a short time, regional officials have no interest in drawing permanent storage duties.
Problem is, neither does anybody else in the country.
The Navy last month instructed Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth to prepare plans for possibly laying off as many as 600 workers because the state of Idaho, which was supposed to accept warship wastes until a permanent site could be built in Nevada, is suing the government to stop shipments there.
Shipyard workers were supposed to defuel and decommission the Bainbridge, a nuclear cruiser. But with no state willing to take the wastes, and with inadequate storage in Portsmouth, that job is in jeopardy.
Adm. Bruce DeMars, head of the Navy's nuclear program, calls the storage problem a possible threat to national security. He has appealed to Congress for help. No solution has surfaced.
Virginia Power faces a similar storage dilemma with spent fuel rods from its two nuclear power stations in the state - in Northern Virginia and in Surry on the James River.
As of 1992, the North Anna plant held 457 metric tons of waste in temporary storage, while Surry kept 548 metric tons on its grounds, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute in Washington.
At Surry, old fuel rods are sealed in steel casks that resemble giant tear drops. A high chain-link fence and an armed guard protect the casks on a slab of concrete located down a makeshift road behind the plant's two reactors.
But with time and space running out, the nuclear-power industry is lobbying Congress to pass legislation that would mandate construction of an interim storage site by 1998.
The site also would be located in Nevada, and would hold all 30,000 metric tons of reactor waste now sitting idle at the nation's 109 nuclear plants.
The bill passed a House committee last week, but is being cautiously criticized by the Energy Department, which says it needs the site but can't build one by 1998.
Much of the radioactive material that comes through facilities run by the Virginia Port Authority is a low-level nuclear fuel stock called uranium hexafluoride. The authority handles about 35 shipments per year, said Linda G. Ford, a port spokeswoman.
The material is loaded onto trucks or rail cars and transported to nuclear plants across the country. By itself, uranium hexafluoride is not dangerous, although its movement is closely regulated by state and federal officials.
While environmental groups concede that the fuel stock is not a big concern, they continue to issue warnings and urge tighter scrutiny of all nuclear materials.
``It's just the nature of things that humans ultimately make an error,'' Deegan said, ``and when you're dealing with extremely radioactive material, that's not a comforting reality.''
KEYWORDS: NUCLEAR WASTE HAZARDOUS WASTE HAMPTON ROADS HAZARDOUS CARGO
AND WASTE by CNB