Ohio to Ship Radioactive Waste to Nevada

Hundreds of tons of radioactive material that environmentalists fear could seep into the Cincinnati area’s water supply will be shipped from Ohio to Nevada for storage and possibly for re-use, it was disclosed Friday.

Truckloads of the 13,000-barrel, 1,210-ton shipment will join thousands of tons of low-level radioactive wastes and material from other U.S.-run plants already buried at the Nevada Test Site, state and federal officials said.

The shipment stored at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Feed Materials Production Center in Fernald, Ohio, will be buried in a way that would let the unused radioactive material be retrieved, a DOE official said.

Contains Thorium

“What makes these 13,000 barrels unique from other shipments is the thorium they contain,” said Peter Fitzsimmons, director of the Health, Physics and Environmental Division of the Las Vegas DOE office.

“Usually, we just put the barrels in a trench, cover it up and it’s gone, period. But this thorium has a possible future use so we want to be able to retrieve it,” he said.

Thorium is a radioactive metal used in breeder reactors to produce weapons-grade uranium. The DOE does not have current use for it because there are no breeder research programs, Fitzsimmons said.

The 1,050-acre DOE plant in Fernald has operated at the site 18 miles northwest of Cincinnati for 36 years. It had processed uranium for shipment to DOE reactors elsewhere for use in making the government’s nuclear weapons.

“No one knows of a program to use it for right now,” Fitzsimmons said. “But we want to know how to get back at it because it is a potentially strategic material.”