LA Weekly

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The NRC has begun to consider whether depleted uranium, or DU, should continue to be classified as low-level, or Class A waste, even though it's about 35 times more radioactive than any other Class A waste. Seems pretty straightforward to me, but let's explore the issues raised by this weekend's Salt Lake Tribune story, just for kicks:

DU comes out of the country's single uranium enrichment plant in Paducah, Kentucky, by the barrel; it has built up there and at Paducah's "sister" facility, the now nonoperational Portsmouth, Ohio gaseous diffusion plant.

(Gaseous diffusion involves turning the uranium into gas and force it through a series of membranes until its reduced to the appropriate concentration of uranium-235: Four percent for most reactors; 90 percent for weapons.)

At issue is whether DU poses a low-enough risk to workers that Utah's Envirocare dump should be allowed to store it. If Envirocare can't store it, it will lose a plum contract with a proposed New Mexico uranium enrichment facility run by Louisiana Energy Services.

Naturally, the people who want the contract to go through think DU isn't so bad:

Louisiana Energy Services and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff have based their dose estimates on calculations made by the U.S. Energy Department, which says that depleted uranium is well under the 25 millirem considered safe.

Anti-nuclear folks such as Arun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, however, say DU is actually pretty dangerous.

Makhijani says none of them has done the homework and the dose would be many times higher. And he noted that depleted uranium gets even more radioactive over time, because the metals produced when it decays have a more destructive radioactive energy than uranium.

And then there's this guy:

Rod Kirch, the vice president of licensing [for Louisiana Energy Services], said the environmental groups have exaggerated the risks.

"This material is pretty benign," he said. "It has been handled for 50 years without trouble. . . ."

Ah-hem.

Now, I don't pretend to know the answer to this one, but I'm pretty sure benign is the wrong word here. And some Gulf War vets and mothers of babies in Basra might agree with me.

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