Documents Show Boundaries at Nuclear Waste Dump Are Foggy

Forty-year-old nuclear waste burial grounds at the government’s secret plutonium operations in eastern Washington have been inaccurately mapped and no one knows how much radioactive waste from the U.S. nuclear weapons program they contain, newly released documents said Thursday.

The burial sites contain what one 1961 document describes as “high-level” plutonium and fission products, as well as low-level and transuranic nuclear wastes. The sites are about five miles from Richland, Wash., a city of 30,300 on the banks of the Columbia River.

“The problem of inaccurately marked burial grounds is an ongoing problem here at Hanford (Nuclear Reservation) and is a legacy from the early days,” said the heretofore secret audit, released Thursday by the U.S. Department of Energy in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

According to the internal audit by Rockwell International, which has a contract with the Department of Energy to operate the plutonium plants, two burial grounds were so badly marked that a fence put up to isolate one area actually straddles the site at a 90-degree angle. In another case, an electrical power line was routed through an unmarked nuclear waste dump.

The findings are yet another indication of problems at Rockwell’s plutonium operations at Hanford. Two plutonium processing plants were ordered closed Oct. 8 by the Energy Department after reports of safety violations that could have led to life-threatening radioactive accidents.

The Hanford operations have produced a major share of the nation’s plutonium for nuclear weapons. The two burial sites in question existed before Rockwell began operations in 1977. General Electric Co. was involved in the plutonium operations earlier.

‘Insignificant’ Discharges

There have been no indications that the burial grounds pose any health threats. An Energy Department spokesman noted that annual environmental monitoring of radioactive contamination from the entire 570-square-mile Hanford Nuclear Reservation has found only “insignificant” discharges into the environment. A Rockwell spokesman, Mark Musolf, added that, as far as he knew, no contamination from the buried waste in question had reached the Columbia River, a mile away.

Those reports found that a person in the area received an average of two millirems a year of radiation from the site, compared to a background level in the environment from natural radiation and atmospheric nuclear tests of 100 millirems a year.

The Energy Department, which is conducting its own investigation into Rockwell operations at the two plutonium plants, declined further comment on the latest audits. “We’re not saying anything at all. They were Rockwell’s internal audits that we have not reviewed,” agency spokesman Thomas Bauman said in a telephone interview from Richland. The Energy Department’s nuclear operations are not monitored by the independent U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

On Thursday, the Energy Department announced that it would not complete its investigation until Nov. 21. The original deadline was Oct. 24. The agency said that the plants will remained closed until it is persuaded “that all actions necessary for safe operations of the facilities have been completed.”

Questions about the waste burial sites were raised as long as 25 years ago, according to other documents released Thursday. A memo dated March 3, 1961, written by a General Electric official, noted that the amounts of buried radioactive wastes, including “high-level liquid and solid wastes--fission products and plutonium” was unknown.

The burial of solid radioactive wastes in the vicinity examined by Rockwell’s audit earlier this year began in early 1944. At one point, solid uranium waste was buried along with plutonium and fission products.

Rockwell spokesman Musolf said in a telephone interview that most of the buried radioactive waste is believed to be low-level or transuranic. He said he could not explain why GE would refer to some of the waste as high level. He also said that the portion of the burial site that lies outside the fence has been temporarily roped off.

Transuranic materials are those contaminated by small but highly toxic particles of plutonium. While transuranic waste is not as immediately deadly on contact as high-level waste--which emits a more penetrating type of radiation--transuranic particles can remain a hazard for tens of thousands of years.

Problems with outdoor radiation areas are not restricted to the two burial sites mentioned in the audit, other documents indicated Thursday.

No Money Available

A Dec. 19, 1985, internal letter said funding was not available to respond to 36 other concerns raised by auditors.

Despite long-standing problems with the inactive burial sites, repeated requests for funds to correctly identify the locations and to determine the quantities of buried wastes were rejected by Rockwell until this year. Company documents released indicated there were higher priority projects, some of which posed problems similar to those posed by the burial grounds.

As late as last March, findings contained in the internal Rockwell audits were dismissed as inaccurate by F. Torres, manager of Rockwell’s outdoor radiation area operations, who downgraded the discovery from a proven “finding” to the status of an undocumented “observation.”

Torres’ action prompted a reply dated May 6 from J. Baker, manager of safety and quality assurance audits who told Torres that the audit findings “cannot arbitrarily be changed to an observation” and called attention to the 1961 General Electric memo that Baker said “further substantiates the inaccuracy of the (two burial ground) boundaries.”

Serious Questions

One goal of the outdoor radiation area operations is to “eliminate or reduce the possibility of contamination migrating from these sites, prevent animal intrusion and reposting sites as surface contamination.”

Serious questions about the location of the buried nuclear waste were apparently first raised most recently after a brush fire in 1984 that left the ground bare. Aerial photography revealed that there was ground subsidence outside the fenced boundaries at one of the burial sites.

Auditors also found that “many” inactive burial grounds were marked with signs so old that they were difficult to read.