Nuclear Waste Reclassification Plan Approved by Senate Panel

WASHINGTON, DC, May 10, 2004 (ENS) - The Senate Armed Services committee has added a rider to the $422 billion fiscal year 2005 Department of Defense authorization bill that will allow the U.S. Energy Department to reclassify millions of gallons of high level nuclear waste at South Carolina's Savannah River site as less hazardous.

The language would give the department the authority to leave the waste on-site, a move opposed by environmentalists as irresponsible and unsafe. The bill passed out of committee Thursday and is expected to hit the Senate floor next week.

The rider centers on high-level radioactive waste stored in 51 massive underground tanks at the Savannah River site, which contains more than half the radioactivity in the entire U.S. nuclear weapons complex.

The federal government has kept this waste on-site with the aim of retrieving it and moving it elsewhere for safe storage.

The Savannah River is a site burdened with the radioactive legacy of the Cold War. (Photo courtesy Energy Department )

The repository chosen for disposal of this waste, which under law must be encapsulated in glass for burial, is the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada.

Although the liquid wastes can be drawn out and removed, the Energy Department's method for removing the most radioactive sludge out of the tanks has proven unsafe.

The department is exploring alternatives, but the Bush administration favors diluting the waste with grout and leaving it on-site permanently.

Savannah River has already diluted two tanks despite evidence that the residual radioactivity had concentrations far above the maximum limits allowed by federal regulations for shallow land disposal of waste.

"This is making a residual waste problem that could be remedied in the long term - with development of technology - into one that will be extremely difficult or impossible to remediate," says Arjun Makhijanim, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.

Makhijanim authored a 77 page report released in March that detailed major flaws in the federal government's management of wastes at the Savannah River site.

The report found the Energy Department does not have a reliable inventory of how much waste and contamination is at the site and its long term plan to safeguard the waste is flawed.

More than a third of U.S. weapons plutonium and almost all of its tritium was produced at the Savannah River site.

For the Energy Department to leave the grouted tanks on site, the waste would have to be reclassified as less hazardous - last year a federal court in Idaho rejected the agency's attempt do this through a federal rulemaking process.

The court agreed with the Natural Resources Defense Council, which argued that the Energy Department's decision to reclassify high level nuclear waste in storage tanks as "incidental waste," violated federal law and would allow the agency to use a substantially less protective standard of cleanup the waste.

The judge wrote that the Energy Department "does not have discretion to dispose of defense [high-level waste] somewhere other than a repository established under [the Nuclear Waste Policy Act]."

The administration has appealed that ruling but has pressed Congress to provide it with a legislative remedy - the language in this rider accomplishes the goal.

The Savannah plant has tanks similar to these at a federal facility in Hanford, Washington - at least 70 of the Hanford tanks have leaked some one million gallons of waste into the soil. (Photo courtesy Energy Department )

Deputy Secretary of Energy Kyle McSlarrow said the administration is "very pleased with the action take by Senate Armed Services Committee to clarify the Secretary's authority to proceed with accelerated cleanup of the tank farms at the Savannah River Site."

McSlarrow says the NRDC lawsuit and subsequent ruling are inhibiting efforts to dilute and secure the waste.

The rider does not, however, give the department authority to reclassify similar wastes at facilities in Washington and Idaho.

"We have several important issues to resolve and we look forward to continuing our discussions so that we can devise a solution that will work for these other states as well," McSlarrow said.

Critics say the administration is trying to shortchange the department's clean up responsibilities and to bully states into accepting the policy.

They note the administration has also asked Congress to allow the Energy Department to withhold some $350 million in cleanup funds from the sites in South Carolina, Washington and Idaho until the reclassification issue is resolved.

Washington Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell has vowed to battle the amendment and the funding issue on the Senate floor.