COLUMN ONE : Caught in Fallout of Waste War : The Ward Valley standoff leaves the state’s nuclear medicine industry with no place to dump its radioactive trash. Some fear that accidents, research cuts and higher drug costs could result.
Behind stairwells, beneath parking garages, in hundreds of spare rooms in hospitals and biotechnology laboratories across California, a slow but steady accumulation of radioactive refuse is giving a new urgency to the prolonged debate over how to dispose of nuclear waste.
Up to now, that debate has focused on the wisdom of burying nuclear power plant debris--largely plutonium, with its 50,000-year half-life--at Ward Valley in the Mojave Desert 20 miles from the Colorado River.
Under heavy pressure from anti-nuclear activists, the Clinton Administration has put the Ward Valley project on hold by indefinitely postponing transfer of the property to California.
However, the decade-long standoff over Ward Valley has done more than deprive the nuclear power industry of a guaranteed sanctuary for spent plutonium. It has meant that California’s research hospitals and biotech industry have no place to ship their radioactive trash--the syringes used to treat terminal cancer patients with pain-killing radioisotopes, the residue from compounds used in AIDS therapy, or the carcasses of lab animals shot full of experimental radionuclides.
As a result, experts warn, a crisis awaits the industry. Left unresolved, they say, the problem of what to do with nuclear waste could drive up the cost of certain drugs, lead to a reduction in medical research and put a damper on California’s biotech industry--one of the few bright spots during the state’s protracted recession.
As the metal drums containing the waste multiply, the people responsible for its safekeeping are beginning to worry about the potential for accidents, vandalism or carelessness. Contamination by this low-level waste could pose an increased risk of cancer and infections.
There are about 2,300 licensed users, big and small, of radioactive material throughout California, about half devoted to medicine or biomedical research. Virtually all of them generate some form of waste. For years, they were able to send long-lived waste to burial sites out of state. But that luxury is fast disappearing as long-distance disposal costs rise astronomically and as dumps in Washington state, Nevada and South Carolina close their gates to outsiders. Increasingly, users are being forced to store the material on their own property.
Nuclear medicine was pioneered in California nearly 60 years ago when radioactive phosphorus was first used successfully to treat leukemia. Today, nearly 12 million Americans are given radioactive material to diagnose or treat illness every year. California’s biotech industry leads the world in the marketing of radioactive drugs for the treatment of AIDS, cancer and a host of immunological disorders and infectious diseases. California companies account for more than half of the $6 billion in revenues generated by U.S. biotech companies.
Today, many of these companies are in a scramble to find places to store the waste of nuclear medicine, most of which was slated to be dumped in desert trenches at Ward Valley.
“We have sufficient capacity to store on site,” said Bruce Wallace, head of environmental health and safety at Amgen Inc., of Thousand Oaks, the nation’s largest biotech company. “But nothing we can build here will match a Ward Valley in terms of safety and stability.”
Opponents of the Ward Valley site fear the possibility of plutonium leaking from the dump and making its way into the Colorado River. Led by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), they are promoting the idea of an alternative. The leading candidate is an above-ground storage facility that could take a big chunk of the medical waste but would not be suitable for plutonium.
However, prominent representatives of nuclear medicine reject the idea, arguing that because of its longevity, much of the waste they produce should be buried in a place like Ward Valley, which they think is safe for all forms of nuclear waste. They also worry that a search for an alternative site would bog down in yet another protracted battle with anti-nuclear groups.
“We can’t afford another 10 years of delays,” said Carol Marcus, associate director of nuclear medicine at Los Angeles County Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. “We can’t afford another one year of them.
“You want to see 55-gallon drums of this stuff toppling over in alleyways? . . . Because that’s where we’re headed.”
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Virtually none of the nuclear material used in hospitals or commercial laboratories compares with plutonium in terms of life span or toxicity. Much of the medical waste loses its radioactivity after a few days of storage and can be flushed safely down the drain. But there are a number of isotopes commonly used in hospitals and research facilities that take years and, in a few cases, centuries, to decay to a benign state.
Getting rid of that stuff is the challenge bedeviling practitioners of nuclear medicine.
At Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in West Los Angeles, Donna L. Earley, director of radiation and environmental safety, said she is forced to hold long-lived waste that she is not licensed to store by the state Department of Health Services.
“My license won’t allow anything with more than a 90-day half-life,” Earley said.
(Half-life is the time in which a radioactive substance loses half its radioactivity. Generally, a radioactive substance remains radioactive for 10 times its half-life.)
“I’m breaking the law keeping tritium (12.3-year half-life) and carbon-14 (5,730-year half-life) because I have no place to send it,” Earley said.
Both are commonly used isotopes. Carbon-14 helps in the detection of infections, including AIDS, in blood banks.
One alternative for Earley and others is to cut back on research employing long-lived isotopes, and that, they say, is a real possibility.
Earley said researchers at Cedars are deep into a 10-year study that tracks the effectiveness of drugs designed to dissolve blood clots in heart attack victims. The research involves the injection of five isotopes into laboratory pigs.
Once dead, the radioactive pigs must be refrigerated until they can be placed in sealed drums and buried. Like any animal remains, the pigs cannot be stored long, even in refrigerators, before they begin to rot. Besides the stench and normal health hazards associated with decaying flesh, there is the potential for radioactive gases escaping from the carcasses.
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Until last January, Cedars sent its waste to a radioactive waste dump in Washington. Then that dump was closed to outsiders. With no place to dispose of the pigs, Earley does not know whether the research project will have to be altered or abandoned.
The storage problem is particularly acute at UC San Francisco, where radioisotopes play a vital role in one of the nation’s largest AIDS research centers.
According to Ara Tahmassion, the university’s director of environmental health and safety, his office is spending 40% of its budget on waste disposal. Those costs have doubled in the past two years, he said.
Meanwhile, he said, storage space on campus has shrunk to almost nothing.
“If we don’t get Ward Valley, I can store up to four months before I run out of space,” Tahmassion said. At that point, he said, the university may have no option but to limit the use of radioisotopes.
There are many hospitals in the state that are not feeling the same pinch. Myron Wollin, the radiation safety officer for seven Southern California Kaiser Foundation hospitals, said those institutions use exclusively short-lived isotopes and, as a result, can easily store the waste in closets.
Other officials must cope with the risks of stockpiling longer-lived radioactive waste. At USC, Leo Wade, vice president for environmental safety, said the school anticipates setting aside 2,220 square feet of additional space--enough room for a house--to store nuclear waste.
The storage space, which must be properly insulated, ventilated and monitored, will cost about $500,000, Wade said. “Every bit of it is money that otherwise would go to teaching or research,” he said.
Wade takes a measured view of the risks involved in storing dozens of barrels of nuclear waste in the middle of a big city.
“I don’t think there are huge liabilities. I think it is a small liability that is going to get bigger.”
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Like a lot of his colleagues, Wade believes that nuclear medicine has become an orphan in the political storm raging over the Ward Valley site.
Even Ward Valley’s opponents concede that if it were not for the specter of nuclear power plant waste--of plutonium leaching its way into the Colorado River--the dump would be up and running.
“If the waste were solely medical and biomedical, I believe there would have been no fight,” said Dan Hirsch, whose anti-nuclear organization Bridge the Gap has masterminded Ward Valley opposition for years.
Now, Hirsch is working with Boxer on a proposal for an above-ground alternative to Ward Valley. The plan calls for segregating waste, shipping medically related garbage to a giant storage facility in a location yet to be determined. Nuclear power plants would then be forced to hold on to their waste, as they are doing, until a burial site other than Ward Valley is approved.
Even though both sides in the Ward Valley battle agree that the future of nuclear medicine should not be compromised, their history of acrimony hinders their ability to come up with a solution. Neither side is inclined to trust the other.
“Why should I believe anything that Dan Hirsch has to say?” asked Marcus at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. “He has been fighting the nuclear industry, in one form or another, for 10 years that I know of. And now he wants to help us? Give me a break.”
Hirsch, in turn, sees the Marcus camp as a stalking horse for the nuclear power industry. He argues that she and other outspoken representatives of the biomedical community exaggerate their needs--inflating the volume of their waste--in order to make a case for Ward Valley.
The debate over Ward Valley alternatives may hinge on the quantity and longevity of biomedical waste that must be disposed of. For years, the proponents of Ward Valley have said that radioactive refuse from hospitals and laboratories represents at least one-third of the radioactivity of the waste destined for the dump.
More important, they argue, most of the radioactivity from medical and biomedical waste is emitted by long-lived isotopes that belong underground. Above ground, they would outlive the containers in which they were stored.
Hirsch, on the other hand, said there are enough ways to reduce long-lived waste to make above-ground storage practical for most medical and biomedical refuse.
He said nuclear power plants, which are temporarily storing their own plutonium waste, could take the most toxic and durable of the biomedical waste products. He maintains that the federal government is now capable of recycling some long-lived waste, such as tritium, which accounts for most of California’s long-lived biomedical waste. And he argues that science is continually providing new, non-radioactive substitutes for many of the radioisotopes used in research.
Jack Horner of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and others involved in the disposal and regulation of nuclear waste, regard Hirsch’s proposals as unrealistic, at least for now.
“Power plants would have to be licensed to receive biomedical waste,” Horner said. With their own waste piling up on site, he said, the utilities have little incentive to apply for a license to take care of other people’s waste. “They want Ward Valley built. They don’t want to become Ward Valley.”
As for the recycling of radioactive material, industry spokesmen say they already do what they can afford to do and are still stuck with significant quantities of waste. They dispute Hirsch’s claim that the U.S. Department of Energy is prepared to recycle their radioactive residue.
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Industry officials also take issue with Hirsch’s argument that non-radioactive substitutes can substantially reduce the need for radioisotopes in medical research.
Scientists want to have access to both approaches, said Bill Larson, a past president of the Southern California chapter of the Health Physics Society.
“It’s not an either-or proposition,” Larson said. “Almost everybody prefers multiple processes when they can have them. It means more parallel paths for tracking the same experiment.”
Larson spoke for many in the biomedical world when he argued that above-ground storage of nuclear waste represents a political rather than a practical solution to the problems of nuclear waste.
“The cost of maintenance, the risks from fire and from earthquakes are greater above ground,” he said. “Above ground storage only makes sense if you are trying to cut out plutonium--in other words, if our goal is to end nuclear power. I don’t think you are going to get a lot of people in my profession to sign on to that agenda.”
Radioactive Materials
Radioactive materials, such as radioisotopes, are widely used in some branches of medicine, including nuclear medicine and radiation therapy. Generally, a radioactive substance remains radioactive for 10 times its half-life. Some of these radioisotopes and their medical uses include:
RADIOISOTOPE: Barium-133 HALF-LIFE: 10.5 years MEDICAL USE: Calibration of equipment used in radiation treatments.
RADIOISOTOPE: Carbon-14 HALF-LIFE: 5,730 years MEDICAL USE: Research studies of metabolism and detection of genetic abnormalities.
RADIOISOTOPE: Cobalt-60 HALF-LIFE: 5.3 years MEDICAL USE: Radiation therapy for cancer.
RADIOISOTOPE: Iridium-192 HALF-LIFE: 73.8 days MEDICAL USE: Radiation therapy for cancer.
RADIOISOTOPE: Strontium-89 HALF-LIFE: 50.5 days MEDICAL USE: Easing of cancer patients’ pain when the disease spreads to the bones.
RADIOISOTOPE: Natural uranium HALF-LIFE: 4.47 billion years MEDICAL USE: Some dental fixtures to provide color and brightness.
Sources: Dr. Carol Marcus, associate director of nuclear medicine, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, Moravek Biochemicals
Research by NONA YATES / Los Angeles Times
