Word: sites
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...real solution, both Harvard and MIT safety officers concur, is to local, low-level dumping sites. There are hundreds of sites around the country that could technically qualify as low-level dumping sites, says Greenwood. But as experience all over the nation has demsonstrated, this is one idea that sounds great on paper but is nearly impossible to implement. The problem, in a word, is political: Shapiro says, "everybody is scared of the public." "There's been a major search in the state for location of dumping sites," says Coddington. "But nobody wants a dump in his backyard--or anywhere...
They knew they had a problem last May. Down in Barnwell, South Carolina, local residents and state officials decreed that enough was enough. And they closed down the only radioactive waste disposal site in the East equipped to handle the sludge that university labs were sending their way. Closed it down, that is, to everybody but South Carolina and its neighboring states. Then the word floated up through the tobacco fields and hit Cambridge like Three Mile Island hit the folks at Babcock and Wilcox. One official in the Northeast called down to once-amiable Barnwell and tried...
...office budgeted the same amount. But costs have tripled and, he adds sighing, "We're not going to make it." And these are just shipping costs. Washington officials say private users like Harvard must pay about $16 a gallon to complete disposal once their sludge reaches the Hanford site. The total price tag: an estimated $1.8 million in 1978--and costs are expected to triple this year...
Shapiro describes the problem as "an Alice in Wonderland situation." Universities, he explains, produce very low-level wastes but they must ship them across the country to a place "that should be reserved for high-level materials." With Barnwell effectively shut down, only Hanford and a site in Beattie, Nevada are still taking low-level deposits. At Hanford, officials are already concerned, because containers not meant for more than five-year storage are being misused. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) officials are considering only one new low-level disposal site--the Lion, Kansas salt mines, once ruled unfit to store high...
...alternative to shipping wastes away is on-site disposal. Timothy Johnson, project manager in the waste management division of the NRC, says the commission is currently looking for methods of solidifying and incinerating radioactive wastes. The University of Maryland, for example, is considering building a $150,000 incinerator for low-level sludge, Johnson says. Shapiro says Harvard has heard about such ideas, but has nothing on the drawing board at the moment. "Incineration is the way you're going to have to go," he adds. However, as Johnson explains, such techniques require a large capital investment and university budgets...