Putting the Los Alamos garbage “elsewhere”

New York Times (NYT) has an article about cleanup operations at Los Alamos, where waste is being “dug up and trucked elsewhere.” Best I can tell, “elsewhere” means dry storage and WIPP. For more detail, they also link to this report to Congress from the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) Office of Environmental Management (EM). Aside from the report authors’ decision to use the word “disposition” as a verb, it’s a charming document – nice figures, important bits highlighted, useful executive summary. The NYT also cites the report’s upper estimate for the total cleanup cost as $260 billion, less than the $300 billion I had thought.

The article also includes a link to a DoE flyer about jobs created and saved by the Recovery Act. The good news for nuclear wastenistas is that if you live near one of these 18 locations (I’m 2.5 hours away from the nearest one – boooo) there are jobs. The not so good news is that they have 10,800 new or saved jobs and 73,000 job applicants. So about 14.8% of the people who applied for a job with the nuclear waste cleanup crew got/kept one.

Just for fun, let’s compare that number to college acceptance rates. Applying for and getting one of these nuclear waste cleanup jobs is very roughly equivalent to getting into Amherst, the 18th most selective college in the country. If the hiring/acceptance decisions are completely random, you have a better chance of getting into CalTech or Cornell than of getting one of these jobs.

Decontamination Technology

I once contaminated an analytical balance with some powdered UO2. The cleanup was surprisingly simple; the rad safety people just handed me a commercially available all-purpose household cleaner. (I don’t remember the name of the cleaner, but I think the bottle might have been dark orange.)

Cleanup of contaminated sites is a tad bit more complicated. It's so complicated and difficult, the Department of Energy's 2009 budget request (pdf) indicated it could cost the U.S. roughly $300 billion over the next 30 years. $300 billion! And I thought the $10 billion we spent on Yucca Mountain was bad. [Update: I later saw the number cited as only $260 billion. Only.]

So what is the dominant technology for cleanup of sites contaminated with radioactive material, and why does it cost so much?

The EPA has a website all about environmental remediation technology. According to their screening matrix, solidification/stabilization techniques are favored for most radionuclides. The specific approach I’ve heard the most buzz about uses a permeable reactive barrier (PRB). Essentially you bury a whole bunch of Fe(0) in the path that the uranium (or whatever oxidized baddie) is moving in, and then hope you didn't miss.

I am not aware of anyone is using microbes in any large-scale decontamination efforts yet. It’s a pretty neat idea, although I confess to having a vague Jurassic-Parkian paranoia about it.