Don't renege on vitrification

Don't renege on vitrification

Saturday, December 15, 2001

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD

Unsettling signals from the U.S. Department of Energy suggest the Bush administration is looking to renege on its requirement to glassify Hanford's most dangerous nuclear wastes.

Don't even think of wiggling out of the agreement to vitrify the waste, Mr. President. We don't need more delaying tactics.

A Nov. 19 memo written by DOE cleanup chief Jesse Roberson to the agency's budget director recommends eliminating plans to turn into glass at least 75 percent of the high-level radioactive wastes targeted for vitrification at DOE bomb-making complexes such as Hanford. The memo suggests that two "proven, cost-effective" solutions be devised for treating the waste.

But the grim reality is that more than 50 years after the fact, there's still no proven or cost-effective method of stabilizing these wastes except to glassify them, and even that's fraught with peril.

No one can pretend vitrification is cost-effective; it's hideously expensive. If cost-effectiveness were the concern, somebody should have thought of it in the 1940s, when wastes were "temporarily" poured into tanks incapable of containing the wastes more than 20 years.

After an expensive failed first attempt with a contractor that couldn't deliver the goods, the DOE is to begin construction next year of the first of two vit plants, which is to begin processing liquid waste into glass logs in 2007. Now is not the time to once again derail that train with airy promises of some other magic solution. Come back when your new solutions have a proven track record someplace else.

The administration's nervousness about creating glass logs may stem from worry about where to dispose of them. They supposedly are destined for burial at Yucca Mountain, Nev., in a 1,000-foot-deep repository that must contain the radioactivity for 10,000 years. But safety of the repository is under attack.

Nevada argues that the latest design relies nearly 100 percent on engineered barriers that are really no more than "a glorified waste package" that could be buried anywhere. The law specifies the repository must rely almost exclusively on natural geology, not man-made packaging, to safeguard the wastes.

Meanwhile, a congressional audit has found that DOE could owe utilities as much as $50 billion for failing to take possession of and bury the wastes at Yucca in 1998. That's when taxpayers became legal owners of the private utilities' commercial nuclear wastes.

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