Disposal sites run by American Ecology

Here’s another company specializing in radioactive waste: American Ecology. They have four disposal facilities – Beatty, NV; Grand View, ID; Robstown, TX; and Richland, WA. The NV location is right near Yucca Mountain but doesn’t appear to actually do much with radioactive waste, unless that includes PCB “mixed waste”. The Richland, WA site is listed by the NRC as one of the country’s three low-level waste disposal facilities, and the Idaho and Texas locations only accept naturally occurring radioactive material (NORM) and “NRC-exempt waste”. I’m curious to know how many facilities there are accepting NORM, their geology, and methods. According to a webpage associated with Argonne national lab, “The majority of U.S. NORM waste is going to the commercial injection facility charging $150/bbl [/barrel].”

R.W.M.A. and NORM in Louisiana

Today I had the pleasure of meeting with the staff of Radioactive Waste Management Associates in their office tucked in among the art galleries of Chelsea. Most of the projects they take on are related to transport issues and exposure analysis, and their relationship with industry is often adversarial. They portrayed themselves as fighting for workers who are treated as expendable by their employers.

One of the projects they mentioned doing work on involved radium in some Louisiana oil pipes maintained by Exxon. I’m guessing their work was related to this case described by Bloomberg (pdf). This piqued my interest because I rarely think about radium, and I had not realized just how much of a problem NORM can be for extraction industries. NORM here stands for Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials, although context is everything with acronyms.What are the U-bearing minerals that are so common in the subsurface that drilling so often brings up and concentrates U and its decay products radium and radon?