Nuclear Waste Law Fails to Produce New Dumps : Environment: Slow to find sites for their radioactive trash, states now face storage problems and high costs.

Twelve years after passage of a federal act directing states to build their own low-level nuclear waste dumps, not a single new site is ready to open and disposal fees are escalating.

“The act has failed everyplace in the U.S.,” said Dr. Carol S. Marcus, director of the nuclear medicine outpatient clinic at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. “Nobody has a low-level waste site being built.”

By today, states were supposed to have plans for taking care of their own low-level waste or have agreements with neighbors to use their dumps. But only three states, including California, have selected new waste sites, and none have been approved by licensing authorities.

Some places, including Michigan and Washington, D.C., will not have access to any dump and generators must store their wastes on site indefinitely.

Most other states, including California, will have to pay disposal prices that are several times higher than what was charged previously.

Low-level radioactive waste produced by nuclear power plants, hospitals, universities and other facilities ranges from gloves and test tubes to human and animal tissue to internal components of nuclear reactors.

Radioactive material, which can accumulate in the body and cause cancer, must be disposed of carefully to prevent it from contaminating the food chain or the water supply.

In research, radioactive materials often are used to tag a molecule and follow it through chemical processes in the laboratory. Escalating dumping costs will force scientists to spend more of their grants on disposal, leaving less for research.

The dilemma stems from the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Act, passed by Congress in 1980 in the aftermath of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident.

Three states that had the nation’s only low-level nuclear waste dumps--Washington, Nevada and South Carolina--resented the burden and demanded that other states share the load. Congress agreed.

But citizen opposition to new sites, fueled by disputes over their safety, and complex federal regulations for licensing them have delayed the approval of new dumps.

“The states have squandered 12 years and the deadline falls,” said Alan Pasternak, technical director of a California Radioactive Materials Management Forum, an association of generators. “We’re not talking about putting a man on the moon. We’re talking about replicating what three other states have done for us for decades.”

While states are responsible for providing dumps for many low-level wastes, the federal government disposes of other radioactive materials, including high-level garbage such as spent fuel rods from power plants.

The crisis for much of the country has been averted with the help of South Carolina. Attempting to resolve a financial crunch, the state has agreed to accept wastes from much of the country for the next 18 months--at sharply increased rates.

Disposal fees for California generators, for example, will rise from about $50 a cubic foot to at least $270, in addition to transport costs.

The Nevada site is closing, and Washington state’s dump will be open to only 11 states.

For some low-level waste generators, the answer to higher costs and lack of dumps may be throwing extremely low-level materials into sewers or landfills.

Federal regulations permit the disposal into sewers of materials that fall below certain concentrations and allow the dumping into regular landfills of some extremely low-level, radioactive medical and laboratory wastes.

“It’s been so cheap to bury low-level waste that people have simply thrown in the low-level waste barrel anything that could be radioactive or contaminated,” Marcus said. “ . . . In fact, if you separate your waste, a lot of it is very, very low level and can go out in the garbage dump.”

Generators with the proper licenses also are allowing some radioactive wastes to decay on site and later throwing them out with the regular trash, reducing the volume of radioactive garbage. Much of the radioactive waste generated by hospitals is short-lived and, depending on the isotope, will decay in months.

“Some benefits have come from this (dilemma),” said Sim Shanks, radiation officer at Georgetown University in Washington. “It’s not all downhill.”

Other generators say they will try to limit the amount of radioactive materials they use, a move environmental activists praise.

“Dumping more down the drain or sending it to commercial dumps is not a good thing,” said Daniel Hirsch, an environmental activist. “But the source reduction would be extremely helpful.”

While operators of nuclear power plants in California are poised to send their wastes to South Carolina, other generators are wary.

The South Carolina site has leaked radioactive material in the past, and generators that have never used it fear they could be held financially liable if the federal government ordered a cleanup.

“Anybody who is disposing of any kind of waste would want to be prudent to make sure the sites they are disposing in are acceptable,” said Donna Earley, director of radiation and environmental safety at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

She said generators want to see a full environmental analysis of the South Carolina site before deciding whether to use it.

If Cedars-Sinai decides not to ship to South Carolina, she said, research using radioactive materials will have to be halted. But she said the hospital can store the waste on site for about six months, averting an immediate crisis.

In Michigan, which has not had access to a dump site for two years, the lack of a facility has had a “fairly minimal impact on research,” said Thor Strong, associate commissioner of the state’s low-level radioactive waste authority.

Initially, said Ralph Lieto, radiation officer at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, animal research was curtailed until institutions were able to purchase freezers to store radioactive body parts and tissues.

Now, researchers are being asked in most cases to use only small animals, such as mice, because of limited freezer space.

In the absence of a dump, Michigan has piled up an estimated 36,327 cubic feet of low-level radioactive waste, stored in 53 locations across the state. The nation generated 1.14 million cubic feet of low-level wastes in 1990, the most recent year for which figures are available.

A Michigan power company recently built a $10-million storage facility for its low-level trash, and a hospital converted part of its parking garage to store the radioactive material, said William Lukens, executive director of a Michigan coalition of radioactive material users.

Storage requirements depend on the type of materials being stored. Some wastes may be kept in cardboard boxes wrapped in plastic, others only in lead-enclosed and locked containers. All must be stored in locked and posted rooms, periodically inspected and shielded from extreme temperatures and humidity.

Michigan law prohibits putting a dump near a populated area, Lukens said, but most of the storage sites are located in cities. He, like many others interviewed, said it would be much safer to have a single dump than scattered storage facilities.

“You are going to see somebody screw up and mistakenly dispose of some radioactive waste in an improper way,” Lukens said. “Or you’re going to have an act of nature, like a flood or a tornado, that could destroy the buildings that are serving as temporary storage facilities.”

Michigan is among a handful of places being denied access to the South Carolina dump as punishment for not trying harder to locate its own repositories.

Washington, D.C., is also being forced to store its wastes. Officials there say they cannot put a dump in the urbanized district.

“Most of the (Washington) institutions I have talked to are good for four or five years” of storage, said Shanks of Georgetown University.

In California, supporters of a proposed dump site in Ward Valley blame the state’s government and anti-nuclear activists for the plight of waste producers. Because of lawsuits and political opposition, the Mojave Desert site remains at least a year away from opening.

Opponents contend the Ward Valley dump--located about 250 miles east of Los Angeles and 22 miles west of Needles--would threaten water supplies, a charge supporters dispute.

Though California generators are grumbling bitterly about South Carolina’s disposal fees, they are comparable to what the producers will be paying at Ward Valley if it is licensed.

“The people who wanted Ward Valley were screaming at the top of their lungs that the sky would fall on Jan. 1, and they knew all along it wasn’t true,” said Hirsch, a longtime nuclear policy activist opposed to the site. “But it was a good way to push through approval of this project without resolution of the underlying environmental questions.”

The higher costs for disposal, whether at new dumps or in South Carolina, will force researchers to use a greater proportion of their grants for disposal.

Already, according to Harbor-UCLA’s Marcus, overhead can consume 40% to 70% of a grant, with expenses ranging from telephones to toilet paper.

The director of the hospital’s nuclear medicine outpatient clinic said research institutions will have to renegotiate contracts and grants, most of them with the federal government, to reflect the higher disposal costs.

“Nobody has wanted to look at this problem,” Marcus said.

Though generators say dumps can be maintained safely, public jitters over new sites are not without some justification. Three former low-level dumps in Illinois, Kentucky and New York, built in the 1960s, either leaked radioactive material into ground water or contaminated surrounding soil. Those dumps were closed in the 1970s.

Some environmental activists say that new dumps would be just as environmentally risky, even as their proponents insist technology has improved.

Steve Romano, vice president and manager of California operations for U.S. Ecology, said the three dumps in Nevada, Washington and South Carolina could have taken the nation’s low-level waste indefinitely if it were not for political opposition.

“This isn’t a technical problem,” said Romano, whose firm has contracted to build the Ward Valley site. “This is a political problem.”

Top Waste Producers

These are California’s top generators of low-level radioactive waste, based on volume produced from 1988 through September, 1991. Statewide, about 242,000 cubic feet of the waste was produced during that period. SITE: VOLUME (CUBIC FEET) Southern Calif. Edison, San Clemente: 38,618 General Electric Co., Pleasanton: 36,288 Sacramento Mun. Utility Dist., Herald: 22,491 Pacific Gas & Electric, Avila Beach: 18,965 UCSF, San Francisco: 17,405 U.S. Navy, Vallejo: 16,888 GA Technologies, San Diego: 10,059 Nichols Institute, San Juan Capistrano: 8,178 ICN Pharmaceuticals, Irvine: 7,491 UC Berkeley, Berkeley: 6,956 Thomas Gray & Associates, Orange: 5,102 UCLA, Los Angeles: 4,777 Genentech Inc., South San Francisco: 4,399 Diagnostic Products Corp., Los Angeles: 4,082 Source: California Department of Health Services

Nuclear Waste Production (Orange County Edition, A31)

These are California’s top generators of low-level radioactive waste, based on volume from 1988 through September, 1991. Two of the top 10 producers are in Orange County, and the largest, the San Onofre nuclear plant, is just to the south. Statewide, about 242,000 cubic feet of waste were produced during that period. One curie is equivalent to about 8,000 chest X-rays.

Volume in Generator (location) cubic feet 1. Southern California Edison (San Onofre) 38,618 2. General Electric Co. (Pleasanton) 36,288 3. Sacramento Municipal Utility District (Herald) 22,491 4. Pacific Gas & Electric (Avila Beach) 18,965 5. UC San Francisco (San Francisco) 17,405 6. U.S. Navy (Vallejo) 16,888 7. GA Technologies Inc. (San Diego) 10,059 8. Nichols Institute (San Juan Capistrano) 8,178 9. ICN Biomedical (Irvine) 7,491 10. UC Berkeley (Berkeley) 6,956

Potency in curies 1. 5,950 2. 1,162 3. 1,000 4. 2,296 5. 66 6. 9 7. 21 8. 7 9. 15,298 10. 22

Source: California Department of Health Services