The federal government has been storing a uranium byproduct for so long that some of the 28,000 cylinders stacked in an open yard here are labeled "M.D.," for Manhattan District, leftovers from the project that built the first atom bomb.
After years of studying what to do with its 1.2 billion pounds of the byproduct, depleted uranium in a toxic compound known as uranium hexafluoride, the Energy Department has chosen a solution and this week opened hearings on the plan.The plan is to empty the more than 46,000 cylinders stored at processing plants here in Paducah in the far west of Kentucky near the Illinois border, at Oak Ridge, Tenn., and at Piketon, Ohio, and chemically convert the uranium into safer, more stable forms - "when economically feasible." That means when the department finds a buyer for the material. And that, say experts outside the department and some inside it, probably means never.
"Is there somebody we can sucker into this?" John Volpe, manager of the radiation health and toxic-agents branch of the Kentucky Health Department, said at the first hearing last Thursday. "Maybe somebody inside the Beltway - there isn't anybody out here."
Presenting options, Charles Bradley Jr., the Energy Department program manager for the uranium, listed a variety of possible uses for the uranium cited over the years. But Bradley acknowledged, "None of these have yet panned out."
While the department looks for a market to defray the cost of processing the material, estimated at $2 billion to $4 billion, the cylinders, which weigh up to 14 tons each, are sinking into the dirt, where they rust even faster. When a cylinder rusts through, a toxic smoke leaks out.
Monday, a crew of workers, with a hoisting machine adapted from the logging industry, gingerly lifted one 30-year-old cylinder off its rotting wooden supports, gave it a quick inspection and stacked it nearby on a new concrete stand. The cylinder was one of about 35 they would move Monday, with thousands already moved and thousands ahead, the leftovers from more than half a century of making uranium fuel.
Removing toxic hydrogen fluoride from the compound and converting the uranium to an oxide or metal form would cost up to an estimated $80,000 a cylinder. Scraping and repainting the cylinders - most of which are 4 feet in diameter and 12 feet long - would cost about $1,600 each. So instead they build concrete supports and re-stack them.
Recently the government signed a contract to paint about 10,000 cylinders in the next five years. But at that rate it would take more than 40 years to paint them all, and the new paint lasts only 10 to 12 years.
The material is what is left after a gaseous diffusion plant removes as much as possible of the uranium that is easy to split in a reactor, U-235. That leftover is U-238. For a while nuclear engineers hoped to build breeder reactors, which could turn U-238 into a useful fuel, plutonium. But no one is building breeders.
Another possible reason for saving the material was to scavenge the remaining U-235 in it by using a new processing method. But virgin uranium is now so cheap, and the demand so much lower than once projected, that such use is doubtful, too.
Some engineers still hope that the depleted uranium, which is 30 percent denser than lead, could be used in industry, perhaps as shielding for spent nuclear fuel. The material itself is slightly radioactive.
But people outside the Energy Department doubt that a market will develop. With no attractive alternatives - and with the government explaining that no serious accidents have occurred and none are likely but that hydrogen fluoride can damage lungs or cause death - reaction at the hearing was not friendly.
"We are faced with a critical health, environmental and economic crisis that could have been avoided," said Kristi Hanson, a resident of Brookport, Ill., across the Ohio River from Paducah.
Eugene Hoffman, a metallurgist who retired from the Energy Department's Oak Ridge operations office in 1996, has extensively studied the cylinders.
"Their uses are fictitious," Hoffman said at the hearing.
He urged converting the material before the area is struck by an earthquake. Even without an earth-quake, Hoffman said, the cylinders are now so rusty that the walls of some are no longer thick enough to ship them legally over highways.
Other hearings are set for Tuesday in Oak Ridge, Thursday in Piketon, Ohio, and March 10 in Washington.
Even though some of the material is half a century old, it is considered a resource material rather than a waste, and so federal law does not require a plan for disposing of it.
The federal government is spending $41 million this fiscal year on cleaning up chemical and radiological problems around the site, and wants $71 million for the effort by 2001. But that plan does not address the cylinders.