atomic energy
Nuclear Legacy, Nuclear Future on the Savannah By Frank Carl, Savannah Riverkeeper
Stephen Berend/Savannah Morning News
»The headwaters of the Savannah River arise in
Approaching Vogtle and Savannah River Site by boat from upriver, the homes scattered on the bluffs overlooking the river become fewer and fewer until you almost convince yourself that you are among the early fur traders plying the interior of the continent for the first time. But then you spot huge clouds of water vapor rising in the distance. Several more bends in the river, and you are confronted by two giant 500-foot cooling towers jutting into the skyline, belching out clouds of steam.
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the escarpments of the Blue Ridge Mountains forming waterfalls and whitewater streams. The Savannah and its tributaries, the Tugaloo and Chattooga Rivers form the entire 350-mile boundary between South Carolina and Georgia, draining 10,000 square miles from the Blue Ridge through the piedmont to the coastal plain of the south Atlantic coast. It is in the coastal plain between Augusta and Savannah the lazy meandering river passes between the Savannah River Site, a former nuclear weapons production facility and current nuclear weapons maintenance facility, and Plant Vogtle, a nuclear power plant. These facilities expose the Savannah to one of the highest nuclear risks in the country. These two facilities also represent a compendium of the risks we face from our atomic past, present and, unfortunately, future. Releases from Savannah River Site (SRS) and Vogtle have made the lower Savannah River the most tritium-contaminated environment in the U.S. But Georgia Power, owner and operator of Vogtle facility, wants to expand. They have already begun to acquire the necessary prerequisites from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build two more reactors on the site. But it is storage of radioactive waste at SRS and Vogtle that creates the greatest current risk to the river. Plant Vogtle stores spent fuel rods. With no place to send the waste, it remains on site where it is likely to stay for the foreseeable future—a problem for the Savannah River and every other river with a nuclear power plant on it. The inability of the nuclear industry or the government to effectively deal with the nuclear waste issue for the last 60 years is a key factor in the lack of growth of nuclear power. Legal and technical challenges to the federal government’s Yucca Mountain Repository may prevent it from ever
Waterkeeper Magazine Fall 2006
accepting the nuclear industry’s nuclear waste. It would behoove nuclear utilities to build their local waste storage facilities to last, possibly for centuries, because the waste may remain in their backyards. Presently, Vogtle stores its spent fuel rods in subterranean cooling chambers that have not yet reached capacity because Vogtle is one of the last nuclear plants built. Both reactors were completed well after the accident at Three Mile Island in 1979. When it comes to nuclear waste, however, the Savannah River Site (SRS) makes the nuclear power plants look like amateurs. SRS wins the gold medal for having the most radioactivity of any nuclear weapons facility in the nation and the silver medal in terms of sheer volume of nuclear waste (second only to Hanford in Washington state). SRS, which started operation in 1952, carves 310 square miles out of the South Carolina countryside. In the rush to beat the Soviets in the nuclear arms race, safety and environmental stewardship were sacrificed for speed. Fifty steel tanks hold up to a million gallons of waste each – a mixture of liquid and sludge. Direct exposure would be immediately lethal. SRS reports leaks in primary containment in at least six of these tanks. As the Department of Energy readies the waste for ‘permanent’ disposal, they are playing musical tanks with 34 million gallons of radioactive waste. The liquid waste is pumped in and out of the tanks in a process that prepares the sludge for vitrification. Vitrification is the process in which radioactive sludge is mixed with glass, melted and poured into steel canisters for permanent storage as steel encased glass logs. Vitrification of the waste, however, is an incomplete solution. Before waste can be vitrified substances must be removed that would inhibit the formation of a strong glass product. Solvents used in the extraction process increase the total volume www.waterkeeper.org
