-Caveat Lector- Idaho National Energy Lab Scientists Study Errors from Waste Project Jun. 14 (Post Register/KRTBN)--In the next year, the INEEL will be making decisions on how to deal with some of its hottest and most deadly waste. But officials say they have learned from mistakes made at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, where $500 million was spent on a plant to treat high-level waste that has now been abandoned. A witches brew of solvents, metals and radionuclides like plutonium, cesium, strontium and iodine sits in underground storage tanks and stainless steel bins at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory. That material is left over from decades of site operations, including the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, which separated reusable uranium from highly radioactive waste products. Those liquids and powders must be put into a more stable form before the waste can be sent to a permanent resting site. Over the next three decades, that effort could cost between $3 and $15 billion at the INEEL. But dealing with similar high-level waste has proven difficult and costly at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. In 1983, scientists there began working on a method to separate the most highly radioactive material from the liquid waste stored in underground tanks. The technology turned out to produce large quantities of benzene, an explosive gas, but the site decided in 1995 to push ahead anyway. Last year the agency pulled the plug on that program because of safety concerns. The costs of that unsuccessful venture were almost 10 times greater than the $54 million spent on Pit 9, a failed Idaho cleanup project that has been held up as a colossal waste of taxpayer money. A study released last week by the General Accounting Office said the search for a new separations technology at Savannah River could cost another $1 billion to $3.5 billion. Joel Case, director of DOE-Idaho's high-level waste program and the head of a DOE team to review alternatives for Savannah River this March, said Idaho has the benefit of several years worth of technological advances. But there were other problems in South Carolina he intends to avoid at the INEEL. The contractor hadn't adequately figured out what was in the tanks before deciding on a treatment method, he said. The site became wedded to its pet technology years after the problems became apparent. Officials tried to engineer around them rather than admitting they should give up and try something else. Idaho also has a much lower inventory of waste -- about 1.3 million gallons of liquids and seven silo-sized bins full of radioactive powder. Savannah River has 35 million gallons of liquids stored in tanks. At the same time, there are no easy, off-the-shelf solutions for treating high-level waste. This fall, the agency will ask for public input on a study detailing options and technologies for dealing with the INEEL waste. "These are high-risk programs. There are uncertainties with all of them," Case said. "They all have their pluses and minuses. They all have their warts." Tom Wichmann, who is in charge of the DOE's high-level waste study, said members of the public in earlier meetings have expressed a desire to see things get moving. But he said Idaho needs to spend time and money up front to make the best decisions and avoid a situation like Savannah River. In the next fiscal year, the money going into high-level waste research and development will increase from $4 million to $16 million. But now, the most promising treatment option for dealing with the liquid wastes would include a separations process, but not the one pioneered in South Carolina. The goal is to filter out long-lasting radionuclides that would need to be isolated forever in a permanent dump like Nevada's Yucca Mountain. That waste would be stabilized in glass. The shorter-lived radioactive waste, which needs to be immobilized so it can't contaminate soils or groundwater, would be mixed with concrete and put in a special landfill. The site is looking at three different separations technologies, using solvents and physical processes that work like water softeners, which have been tested on a small scale. "We have done separations on the waste, and it works," Wichmann said. The INEEL could opt not to separate any of the liquids, but that would mean more waste for Yucca Mountain or another permanent dump -- 18,000 shipments vs. 1,800. Officials also plan to spend two years figuring out exactly what is in calcined high-level waste before they decide how to treat it. Since 1963, the INEEL has converted liquid high-level waste into a dry powder. That program helped the site avoid a huge underground liquid waste tank farm like those at Savannah River or Hanford. It has also reduced risks to the aquifer from leaky liquids. But the powdered calcine, which has the consistency of laundry detergent, wouldn't be accepted at a permanent waste dump. The nuclear waste settlement agreement signed with the state of Idaho in 1995 stipulates that all waste must leave the state by 2035. That means 4,000 cubic meters of powder may have to be returned to a liquid form -- essentially reversing more than three decades of work. Case said he had misgivings about that plan. "It really doesn't pass the ho-ho test," he said. "That's a big issue that we're going to have to come to grips with." Another option under consideration would send the calcined waste to a proposed treatment plant, still in early design stages, at Hanford in Washington. With the millions of gallons of high-level liquids and sludges that need to be treated there, the Idaho waste would only add about 3 percent to the workload. But Case said that option depends on how promising the technology looks in a couple years and how politically acceptable that would be. By Jennifer Langston -0- Visit the Post Register on the World Wide Web at http://www.idahonews.com/ (c) 1999, Post Register, Idaho Falls, Idaho. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. END!A$4?IF-ENERGYLAB News provided by COMTEX. 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