Radioactive waste piling up in temporary storage facility

Adam F. Jarrold Arizona Daily Wildcat Mary Booth, Health Physicist with the UA Radiation Control Office, demonstrates with a Geiger counter that the radiation levels in the new low level radiation containment center are only 20 points higher than the levels outside.

The University of Arizona completed construction of a 7,500-square-foot storage building in July just west of the UMC's west parking lot.

Low level radioactive waste will be stored in the $500,000 building indefinitely because the UA lost access to sites in Hanford, Wash., and Beatty, Nev. in 1992, said Charles Sondhaus, director of radiation safety in the UA's Department of Radiation Control.

Without a permanent disposal site available in the foreseeable future, "Institutions like the UA are faced with three choices," said Mary Booth, a health physicist at Radiation Control.

"They can stop the life-saving research that they do, keep lobbying for a permanent disposal site or build a temporary site," she said.

In the cavernous new brick, concrete and sheet metal building, stacks of steel drums, cardboard boxes and bright yellow bags marked with caution stickers hold the university's radioactive waste.

Workers wear no protective clothing or special equipment because the radiation is only dangerous if ingested, Booth said.

About two-thirds of the waste is liquid, mostly wash water from rinsing equipment used with radioactive materials, Booth said.

"There is no glowing, green, gooey stuff," Booth said as she opened a bag to reveal a mix of gloves, plastic and glass containers, syringes, pipettes and paper towels.

Three times each week, workers from Radiation Control collect radioactive waste from laboratories around campus and bring it back to the storage building.

"This material is exactly what you would find in a regular chemistry lab," Booth said.

About half of all radioactive waste generated at the UA is short-lived enough that it can be stored until it is no longer radioactive. It is then treated as medical waste and sent to an incineration plant in Phoenix, Booth said

Any material with a radioactive half-life less than 120 days is stored for disposal, Booth said. Radioactive decay is measured by half-life, which is the amount of time it takes for a material to lose half its energy. Waste is commonly stored for 10 half-lives until its radiation is undetectable, Booth said.

The longer-lived waste, such as that from carbon 14 whose half-life is 5,600 years, is sealed into steel drums to be stored indefinitely.

"The nature of the material is such that it can't even penetrate the steel of the drums it is in," Booth said.

Since the UA lost access to the disposal sites in Nevada and Washington, it has reduced the volume of waste produced by encouraging researchers not to use radioactive disposal bins for common trash, Booth said.

To further decrease volume, Radiation Control recently purchased a $65,000 compactor that packs 400 pounds of waste into a 71-gallon, square drum.

Until recently, Radiation Control used 55-gallon drums which weighed about 165 pounds when full, Booth said.

The UA currently produces between 28 and 38 cubic feet of low level radioactive waste for long-term disposal per month, Booth said.

That material could cost between $500,000 and $750,000 per year to dispose of at a permanent disposal site in Ward Valley, Calif., Sondhaus said. That is, if the site ever opens.

Ward Valley's operator, U.S. Ecology, estimates it will charge about $1,500 per cubic foot to deposit waste there, Sondhaus said.

But it is not certain Ward Valley will ever open, because public opposition to the facility in the Mojave desert near Needles, Calif. is strong.

Daniel Hirsch is president of the Los Angeles based Committee to Bridge the Gap, a group that opposes the Ward Valley site.

Hirsch said opponents of the site are not concerned about research waste, but oppose Ward Valley because 90 percent of the waste sent there will be from the large nuclear reactors in Arizona and California.