Shipments From Kentucky Plant To Nevada Halted For Probe

For the second time in less than a year, shipments of low-level radioactive waste to Nevada from a Kentucky plant have been stopped because of regulatory problems, a newspaper reported Tuesday.

This time, all waste shipments from the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant have stopped for at least several weeks until cleanup workers can determine why low-level radiation was found on flatbed trailers that had carried material for disposal in the desert Southwest, The Paducah Sun reported.

"Fixed" contamination, which does not rub off when merely touched was found on four of eight trailers delivered to the Nevada Test Site from April 28 to May 1, said Greg Cook, spokesman for Bechtel Jacobs, the plant's lead environmental contractor.

The radiation, a fraction of that of a chest X-ray, slightly exceeded the maximum level listed in shipping documents for as many as three trailers, he told the newspaper.

The trailers had carried large, empty, funnel-shaped hoppers in square metal frames that came from a closed plant building being cleaned up. The building, known as the C-410"feed plant," is where workers once combined uranium tetrafluoride, or green salt, with fluorine to create uranium hexafluoride. That product then was fed through the piping system during the enrichment process.

Closed since 1976, the feed plant is identified in DOE reports as perhaps the plant's most dangerous work area, because some of the uranium was recycled from nuclear reactors and contained traces of highly radioactive plutonium and neptunium.

Cook said the shipments were the only ones scheduled for the test site. However, the ban will mean delays in shipping contaminated blocks of scrap aluminum and could affect early shipments of other scrap metal, he said. "We want to be really sure we understand how we misidentified this material," Cook said.

Shortly before Christmas, Bechtel Jacobs resumed shipping tons of the aluminum blocks and empty contaminated ash containers from the old feed plant. The blocks were left over from smelting to recycle metal.

Nothing had been shipped to Nevada since July, when a review of past plant uses of the now-banned cleaning solvent trichlorethylene determined that soil already shipped to the site should have been classified as hazardous waste.

Shipments resumed after state regulators reviewed plant test results and agreed that the soil was not hazardous. Reno Gazette & Journal