Idyllic Valley Is Site of Big Waste Cleanup Effort : Ecological Controversy Surrounds Project to Stabilize Radioactive Material

All is not as it seems in this wooded, idyllic slice of the Allegheny Mountains known as the Enchanted Hills.

True, the Cattaraugus Creek still snakes through sylvan glades of the Zoar Valley as it has for centuries, cutting a 200-foot gorge that enthralls the trout fisherman and thrills the whitewater rafter.

But less than a mile away, a cluster of white buildings surrounded by barbed wire marks the site of some of the most highly concentrated radioactive waste in the world, stored in a massive underground tank.

Fuel Processing

If released into the environment, the resulting radiation from the corrosive, near-boiling liquid would make the scenic area uninhabitable for almost as long as it took to make the gorge. It is the legacy of a former nuclear fuel reprocessing operation.

That ominous distinction has made West Valley, 35 miles south of Buffalo, the scene of the nation’s first large-scale attempt to test radioactive waste treatment technology.

The principles tested here are expected to be used in stabilizing similar wastes at federal installations in Savannah River, Ga., and Hanford, Wash., both of which have significantly greater amounts of radioactive wastes.

“We’re proving that the nation can deal with nuclear wastes safely and effectively,” says Willis Bixby, the Department of Energy’s project director.

Many environmentalists disagree, however, pointing out that modern science does not yet know how to render radioactive waste harmless.

Stable Form Sought

The goal of the $700-million project is to get the liquid wastes out of the aging tank and into a more stable form.

Although other countries--such as France, which relies on nuclear power for 70% of its energy needs--have been using the technology for 20 years, the United States has simply stockpiled its nuclear wastes until now.

West Valley was the nation’s only commercial reprocessing facility. During the late 1960s and early ‘70s, it took in spent fuel from nuclear power plants around the country and extracted usable uranium and plutonium. The byproduct of the process was about 600,000 gallons of waste.

When the facility was built in the mid-1960s, New York Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller saw it as an opportunity for the state to get in on the development of a technology that promised to solve the nation’s energy needs. He envisioned a massive nuclear complex that would include reactors and research facilities.

Forced to Close

But that promise all but disappeared a few years later as declining markets, tougher federal regulations and the radiation hazards to workers forced the facility, run by Getty Oil Co., to close.

It was inoperative from 1972 until 1982, when the federal Department of Energy began the West Valley Demonstration Project, a multimillion-dollar cleanup effort.

The first step in a complicated process that has taken years to set up is to filter the liquid waste through columns filled with zeolite, a sandy clay. The filtering reduces the radioactivity of the liquid by 99%. The liquid is then blended with cement and poured into 71-gallon steel drums. Officials expect to produce about 15,000 of the drums, each weighing 1,000 pounds, by 1994.

300 Glass Logs

The remaining, concentrated zeolite wastes are to be transformed into 300 glass logs. The 10-foot logs will eventually be shipped to a federal repository for high-level wastes scheduled to be opened in Nevada in the year 2003. Until then, the glass logs are being kept on the site.

West Valley Nuclear Services Co., a Westinghouse Electric Co. subsidiary handling the project, activated the treatment systems last spring with about 500 people involved in operations. Inside the white buildings, technicians in green jumpsuits with meters attached to their collars to measure their exposure to radiation use remote controls to pump the wastes through filters and solidification processes.

Except for an incident in 1986, when 11 construction workers were contaminated after passing around a contaminated tool, there have been no major problems at the facility. All but one of the workers were back on the job several hours later.

Public Acceptance

Project director Bixby thinks the safety record will contribute to greater public acceptance of the nuclear power industry.

“We can’t make up for the negative publicity of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl,” he says. “But we can be a positive factor when people consider the risks of energy sources and begin to re-evaluate nuclear energy.”

Increasing attention to the wastes produced by combustible fuels and the so-called greenhouse effect and acid rain will lead people to reconsider nuclear power, he said.

Local environmental activists, however, say the project will prove otherwise.

“It’s impressive what they are doing, but it’s no solution,” says Carol Mongerson, a member of the Coalition on West Valley Nuclear Waste. “All we’ve really done is change it from one form to another.”

Remains Harmful

Mongerson says solidified radioactive waste remains harmful for thousands of years. A single glass log will give off about 8,500 rems, enough radiation to kill a person exposed for only a few minutes.

The coalition sued the state and federal governments to force Westinghouse to conduct an environmental impact study of its plans to hold cement drums in a vault at the site. A federal judge ruled that until the study is completed, the company must store the drums in a temporary facility.