Plan to Export Nuclear Wastes to Germany Raises Safety Fears

The Energy Department has quietly sold West Germany $20-million worth of highly radioactive cesium and strontium and is seeking to clear the way for its shipment from Hanford, Wash., to the Pacific Coast, then through the Panama Canal and across the Atlantic.

It would be the first large-scale export of high-level nuclear waste material, and officials of the environmental activist organization Greenpeace said Thursday that they would attempt to block the shipments.

The West German government arranged in 1984 to buy the 9.5 tons of waste from nuclear weapons production for use in experiments and tests of permanent nuclear waste storage in abandoned salt domes.

The Energy Department’s Hanford operation has processed the waste, which emits twice as much gamma radiation as waste from commercial power reactors, into 3-foot-long glass logs weighing 595 pounds each.

Under the arrangement between the two governments, the waste material will be loaded into 27,500-pound shipping casks and turned over to the Germans at Hanford for shipment by a private contractor.

Initial plans called for the first of three shipments to be made this fall, but officials with the Energy Department and the state governments of Oregon and Washington said that arrangements are unlikely to be completed until at least next spring.

Tentatively, it is expected that the casks will be trucked from Hanford on Interstate 84 through the Columbia River gorge to the port of Portland.

Officials in Oregon and Washington said that they are willing to approve shipment through their states if they are convinced that all safety precautions have been taken.

Although the sales agreement with Germany was concluded five years ago, the Energy Department did not contact local officials about transporting the material from Hanford to Germany until recent weeks.