Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
couple of thousand years. Is it reasonable to believe we can build fuel
rod containers that will last 100,000 years? Nuclear power plants are
monsters that may come dangerously close to devouring us in the name
of “more.” What have we done?
Fernald Nuclear Site
An interesting view of the handling of nuclear waste at a “temporary”
storage site is provided by the Feed Materials Production Center in
Fernald, Ohio.
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From the time it opened in 1951 until it closed in 1989,
the facility enriched 500 million pounds of uranium, two-thirds of
all the uranium used in the nation's cold war nuclear weapons program.
The center also generated 1.5 billion pounds of radioactive waste. There
appeared to be no problems until 1985, when neighbors discovered that
the plant's waste had polluted their air, soil, and drinking water. The
neighbors sued, and the resulting publicity prompted similar revelations
at nuclear facilities around the country.
The site originally included a leaky silo fi lled with highly radioactive
uranium sludge that emitted enormous amounts of poisonous radon gas.
Offi cials at the Fernald center dumped radioactive waste into pits only
twenty yards from a creek that sits on top of the Great Miami Aquifer,
one of the largest aquifers east of the Mississippi. Rainwater carried
uranium into the creek, where it sank and contaminated 225 acres of
the aquifer.
When the Department of Energy (DOE) ran out of room to bury waste
at the 1,050-acre Fernald site, it was packed into 100,000 metal drums,
which were left outside, exposed to rain, snow, and wind. Accidental
releases from the drums covered 11 square miles of surrounding farm-
land in radioactive dust. After lawsuits and much negotiating with the
people living near Fernald, the federal government agreed to move 1.3
million tons of the most contaminated waste to other “temporary”
storage sites in Texas, Nevada, and Arizona. The transfer required 197
trains, each with 60 railcars carrying 5,800 tons of contaminated soil.
The fi nal trainload of radioactive waste left Fernald in October 2006.
Residents in the Fernald area agreed to place the rest, 4.7 million tons,
in a landfi ll at Fernald.
The landfi ll is a winding trench 30 feet deep that is fi lled with ura-
nium-laced soil piled to a height of 65 feet above the landfi ll. It is three-
quarters of a mile in length. The landfi ll is bordered by a wall of rock,
plastic, and clay 9 feet thick whose base is 30 feet above the aquifer. The
DOE expects the wall to last at least 1,000 years. The government spent
