O.C. Firms Weigh Disposal Options : Nuclear waste: With a dearth of nearby dumps, producers face either exorbitant shipping fees or potentially risky self-storage.
Many Orange County companies, including some that rank among the state’s largest producers of low-level radioactive waste, are struggling to find new options for disposal now that their western neighbors have closed their borders to California’s waste.
Starting today, California businesses and utilities can no longer ship their radioactive trash to dumps in Nevada or Washington. The closest disposal site now is in South Carolina, and it is charging California companies a rate at least four times higher than that of the western dumps.
The situation is especially serious in Southern California because of its nuclear power plant, biomedical companies, hospitals and research labs that produce large amounts of low-level radioactive waste. Of the estimated 200 companies in California that dispose of the material, about 90% are south of Bakersfield.
“Industrially speaking, in the volume (of low-level waste) we’re certainly in the top three (states) nationally,” said Ron Joseph, chief deputy director of the California Department of Health Services, the state agency that regulates waste-producing companies. “And Orange and San Diego counties in particular are large sources. They are to biomedical what Silicon Valley is to computers.”
Southern California Edison produces the largest volume of radioactive waste in the state because of the San Onofre nuclear power plant at the Orange County-San Diego County border.
According to the state health department, other top producers in California are the Nichols Institute in San Juan Capistrano; ICN Biomedicals in Irvine, a subsidiary of ICN Pharmaceuticals; Thomas Gray & Associates, a waste brokerage firm in Orange; UC Irvine, and Moravek Biochemicals Inc. in Brea.
Some Southern California facilities, especially universities and hospitals, plan to store their radioactive waste in their own buildings instead of shipping it to South Carolina.
But such stockpiling raises concerns because it increases the risk of an accident.
“Certainly the longer you store the waste and the more you store, the greater risk there is,” said Gerald Feldman, radiation safety officer at UCI Medical Center in Orange, which produces about 100 cubic feet of dry, low-level radioactive waste and about 40 gallons of liquid waste per year.
Even the South Carolina dump is not a permanent solution for California. It will stop accepting the waste of states outside the Southeast in 18 months, and state officials doubt that California will open its own dump by then.
Joseph said the disposal problem has become a major economic issue in California. Although the state’s biotechnology industry is the “bright star” of the recession--doing well despite the downturn--the waste issue is tarnishing it, he said.
ICN Pharmaceuticals, which uses tritium, a low-level radioactive material, to produce medical diagnostic equipment, plans to dispose of about 1 1/2 truckloads of the waste over the next 18 months, said ICN spokesman Paul Knopick. The company, which ranks ninth 9th in California in the volume of low-level radioactive waste created, has recently reduced the amount of waste through new recycling techniques. Like many companies, ICN has not decided what to do now.
