For the first time, the United States has started turning radioactive liquid waste from its Cold War bombmaking days into glass, which scientists say is safer for storage.
U.S. Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary pushed a button Tuesday at the $2.4 billion Defense Waste Processing Facility to start the mixing of deadly radioactive goo with molten glass.The high-strength glass logs that roll out will be just as deadly and will still have to be stored for thousands of years. But as a glass, there is no chance the poisonous waste will explode or seep into the soil.
"What we have now is more like a cup of water - if you spill it, it'll be all over the place," Robert Hoeppel, control room supervisor, told The New York Times. "When we're finished, it will be like ice - you can pick it right back up."
The processing plant is at the Savannah River site, which was a major government complex for producing nuclear weapons. It also created 34 million gallons of radioactive waste that sit in 51 underground tanks.
Workers will combine the waste with molten glass, pour the mix into 10-foot-high stainless steel tubes and then seal them up with a huge jolt of electricity. The canister will then be stored in an underground concrete vault that can hold 15 years' worth of canisters.
Although the process sounds simple, the work will be slow, processing waste at a quart or two a minute, one log a day. At that rate, officials hope to have all the waste at the site - 6,000 canisters' worth - processed by the year 2020.
"We're actually processing radioactive waste," said plant manager Mario Fiori. "That's fantastic."
The plant, which O'Leary called the largest waste-processing facility in the world, will employ 750 people and cost about $200 million a year to run.
The cost comes in automating every phase of the operation, because of the lethal radiation involved. All repairs in the factory will have to be done by remote control.
Experts say that if the process works well, it could be a tool for disposing of surplus plutonium from weapons.