Buried radioactive waste includes a grisly mix of castoffs
http://www.magicvalley.com/timesnews/news/index.asp?view=news6
By N.S. Nokkentved
Times-News writer

TWIN FALLS -- Official records of buried waste at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory include many bizarre items.

But federal Energy Department interviews with site employees in 1989 to 1991 turned up some downright grisly details.

Bill Kerr worked at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory from about 1957 through 1985. He was interviewed Oct. 29, 1990, according to documents newly obtained by the Times-News in a Freedom of Information Act request.

"Parts of human beings: their people in contamination ... figured the best way was to cut the finger off or the arm off, those are some the things that went into the sludge," Kerr said in the interview.

Sludge barrels and boxes shipped to Idaho were used to dispose of any extra low-level waste from the federal government's nuclear bomb factory at Rocky Flats in Colorado. That waste included 35-pound bottles of sodium cyanide, Kerr said.

"If they knew of anything that we couldn't figure out an easy way of getting rid of, we put into sludge barrels, sludge boxes," he said.

Kerr also noted that the internal organs of the three victims of the SL-1 reactor, which blew up in January 1961, were studied and then dumped into the INEEL burial ground.

"Some people think that the bodies were sent back home in lead-lined coffins," Kerr said. "Well part of it, maybe the outer husk was, but anything that could have been used for medical purposes, studies, were kept here and when they were through, those went into the burial ground."

The SL-1 reactor, an experimental low-power reactor, blew up when a control rod was pulled up too rapidly, creating a sudden power surge and steam explosion. The three men working on the reactor were killed.

Other gruesome garbage buried at INEEL includes barrels full of irradiated animal carcasses, including canaries, beagles and salmon, the result of radiological research at various West Coast universities, and drums of animal carcasses from the U.S. Nuclear Corp. in California.

Some of those research programs focused on gastrointestinal diagnosis, in which animals were fed various radioactive materials. Their droppings then were examined and wound up in barrels at INEEL labeled as radioactive animal feces -- nearly a ton of it.

Most of the waste buried at the INEEL was plutonium-contaminated waste from the nuclear weapons plant in Rocky Flats, Colo. The waste began arriving in April 1954. Manifests did not accompany the shipments. Instead, annual reports to INEEL listed only an estimated amount of radioactivity, not actual contents.

During a 1963 labor strike, waste was dumped haphazardly. Many containers were damaged, some leaked liquid -- despite an INEEL policy against burying liquid waste -- and some lids flew off containers.

Officials lost track of the waste.

The practices continued even after the strike was settled. The drums weren't expected to last anyway, and the government at the time had no plans to dig them up.

Until 1960, commercial solid radioactive waste was packed in steel drums and simply dumped in the ocean off both U.S. coasts. The Environmental Protection Agency reported in the 1970s that small amounts of plutonium have leaked from those barrels.

But the government decided to stop the ocean dumping because it was too costly.

That decision drove an Oakland, Calif., entrepreneur out of business. He had collected radioactive waste for sea disposal, and when he went broke in 1960 he left a shipping yard full of waste stacked in 55-gallon barrels.

Caravans of trucks brought it all to Idaho. INEEL officials didn't know what was in the barrels, just that it was radioactive waste.

In May 1960, the 88-acre "Burial Ground" became the "interim burial ground" for commercial low-level radioactive waste produced in the West. Many shipments to INEEL were simply labeled "radioactive waste" with no indications of their actual contents. Some waste producers shipped waste in secondhand barrels -- without changing the labels.

The commercial radioactive waste shipments stopped in August 1963. But the government continued to send Rocky Flats' waste to Idaho, where officials could keep an eye on it.

Following a scientific review of disposal practices and a public outcry in 1970, the dumping was halted.

Meanwhile, the waste still lies in rusting barrels and broken boxes buried in pits and trenches 580 feet above the Snake River Plain Aquifer, which supplies drinking and irrigation water to more than 200,000 people in southern Idaho.

Times-News writer N.S. Nokkentved can be reached at 733-0931, Ext. 237, or by e-mail niels@magicvalley.com