The Trash that Glows

...It obtained a license for the nation's first radioactive graveyard at Beatty, Nevada, in 1962, and the second, at Maxey Flats, Kentucky, in 1963...

...For years they have moved from state to state, setting up new corporations and dissolving old ones, making deals with real estate developers and legislators, finding cooperative state regulators and licensing agencies, opening new dumps and then selling them at a profit, plying their trade under a panoply of corporate names...

...Despite the obvious needs for tougher regulation of the nuclear garbage business, the regulatory standards are steadily deteriorating...

...Large-scale dumping in the central Pacific thus appeared to be the perfect solution...

...Eloise Parsons Baker, a retired physician who lives in the nearby town of Neponset...

...Geological Survey (USGS) who selected Maxey Flats and Sheffield as nuclear dump sites...

...By the year 2000 we will have enough waste to cover a four-lane coast-to-coast radioactive road Ajourneyman radiation monitor at General Electric's Hanford, Washington, plutonium production plant in the early 1950s, Jim Harvey got his start in the nuclear dumping business at a time when the Atomic Energy Commission handled radioactive wastes in the way New York City still disposes of its sewage sludge: dumping it in the ocean...

...By 1975, with Harvey out of NECO and Beierle gone from Chem-Nuclear, the two had joined forces in a new firm, Southwest Nuclear Company of Pleasanton, California, with Harvey as president and Beierle as vice president...

...Major corporations have now moved in on the ground that was broken for them by Beierle and Harvey and are...

...commercial low-level wastes...

...At once, they were off in search of greener pastures...

...But the mood changed after suspicious residents learned of the newcomer's nuclear waste connections...

...Since the mid-1970s, islander sentiment to have the Pacific Ocean declared a nuclear-free zone has gathered momentum in the world community...

...Its multinational rival, Teledyne, equally determined to expand beyond the two remaining dump sites it now operates at Hanford and Beatty, is preparing to do battle in a manner that would make Fred Beierle and Jim Harvey proud...

...He left the impression that the operation would not be much different from an ordinary landfill dump...

...Neither the generators of radioactive wastes nor the dump site operators have long-term responsibilities for protection of the public...

...John Junkerman (John Junkerman, a free-lance writer in Boston, specializes in Asian issues...

...The new name is US Ecology, Inc...

...In the siting of oil storage bases and refineries, the exploitation of lumber resources, the construction and operation of tourist resorts, and many other overseas projects, the enterprising Japanese have too often played fast and loose with the environment, local economies, and opposition groups...

...But many Kansans are suspicious...

...Fred Beierle's California Nuclear sold its interest in the Sheffield and Hanford waste dump operations in 1968 to NECO, Jim Harvey's firm...

...Soon afterward The Kansas City Star revealed that an application to dump nuclear waste in the Carey salt mine, filed by Southwest Nuclear in May 1978 and then transferred to the Rickano Corporation, also controlled by Beierle and Harvey, was kept secret for more than fifteen months with the cooperation of the Kansas Division of the Environment...

...Today, Barnwell is the busiest of the nation's commercial nuclear dumps, with twenty to thirty-five trucks from all over the country lined up bumper to bumper at its front gate on any weekday morning...

...Leroy Stratton of the Radiological Division of the Illinois Department of Public Health helped Beierle through the rezoning hoops...

...In rural northeastern Texas, where Beierle tried unsuccessfully to set up shop in the mid-1970s, the folks who banded together to head him off still remember him as "The Fox...

...The original standard, agreed to in the mid-1970s by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the U.S...

...By early 1980, however, word of the Japanese plans reached the citizens of the tiny islands that dot the central Pacific, to whom the ocean is front and back yard as well as farm and neighborhood...

...In 1978, after a successful plunge into chemical waste dumping in Louisiana, he returned to the nuclear business with an ambitious scheme centered on Lyons, Kansas, the site of an earlier, ill-fated Atomic Energy Commission plan to bury high-level nuclear wastes in subterranean saltbeds...

...Having found a prospective site 900 kilometers south of Tokyo in 6,000 meters of water, the Japanese government laid plans to conduct a test dump in 1981 of 10,000 barrels containing about 500 curies of radioactivity...

...With twenty-two nuclear power plants already on line and another fifteen planned and under construction, Japan has one of the highest levels of nuclear development per square mile in the world...

...Their opposition stems from a number of sources...

...In the months since they learned what was in store for them, the islanders have seen reports of nuclear waste dumping elsewhere in the world's oceans and have heard scientific assessments of the attendant hazards...

...While operators like Beierle and Harvey test the water and pull the strings and make the deals that are a part of the business of opening new dumps, the giants of the business are waiting in the wings...

...A large nuclear power plant generates about 1,000 cubic meters of low-level radioactive waste each year—enough to cover a football field to a depth of one foot...

...In the end, the public will be left holding the bag...

...In the mid-1960s, the nuclear power industry was beginning to boom, and that meant certain growth for the nuclear garbage business, too...

...Much of the radioactively contaminated material sent to Beatty for burial—tools, clothing, and the like—would find its way into the economy of central Nevada...

...Added to this is the postwar reputation the Japanese have won for themselves in much of Asia and Oceania: Tokyo's government-business juggernaut is as well known for the callousness of its development push as is the quality of Japanese goods in the West...

...Beierle thinks the Lyons mine will be selected if a compact is approved—and he could be right...

...Long-term plans call for the burial at sea of as much as 100,000 curies annually into the indefinite future...

...reaping profits commensurate with their larger size...

...Beierle and Harvey wooed the Lyons Chamber of Commerce with talk of storing low-level wastes in the abandoned Carey Company salt mine...

...Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), was that no "migration" (that is, leaking) of radioactive material from the waste disposal site could be permitted...

...A law passed by Congress in 1980 would make participating states responsible for regulation and care of the new regional dumps...

...In tones that would sound familiar in Maxey Flats, Sheffield, and Delta County, Texas, Fred Beierle has been reassuring worried townspeople in Lyons that they would have nothing to fear from his truck-loads of low-level nuclear waste...

...He organized a local publicity campaign, spoke to the Rotary and Lions clubs, took school children on a tour of the site, and hired a lobbyist to promote his interests in the state legislature in Springfield...

...Harvey managed both dumps...

...The same lack of tough, independent regulation dogs the fourteen sites, scattered around the country, where the U.S...

...Well, the most interesting thing about Fred Beierle and Jim Harvey is that, in many ways, they are the nuclear garbage business...

...Catherine Thiel Quigg, a free-lance writer, is research director for Pollution and Environmental Problems, Inc., a public interest group in Palatine, Illinois...

...Beierle says Governor Carlin has already talked to Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Louisiana, and Texas officials about dumping at Lyons...

...For one thing, the island of Tinian, which the United States used as a base to launch the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was a Japanese colony between the two world wars, and many of its men and boys were conscripted by the Imperial army for service in the Pacific war...

...I'd love to have Illinois waste...

...The appeals of visiting islanders struck a responsive chord among Japanese fishermen this past spring: Already alarmed by two serious leaks of radioactive water from a reactor into the Japan Sea last January, fishing organizations for the first time called for a review of Japan's nuclear energy program and announced their opposition to the dumping plans...

...The third, at West Valley, New York, which opened in 1963 and closed twelve years later because of environmental contamination, is the only such facility with which Harvey and Beierle were never associated...

...A "superfund" for the nuclear industry would be helpful, but the costs are likely to be far greater...

...I imagine states like Nebraska and Iowa are logical places, too," he told a reporter recently...

...The following year, Beierle helped organize a new company, Chem-Nuclear Systems, Inc., which in 1971 established the nation's sixth and newest commercial nuclear dump in rural Barnwell County, South Carolina, on land adjacent to the Atomic Energy Commission's sprawling Savannah River plutonium and tritium production plant...

...That's enough to cover a four-lane highway one foot deep from coast to coast...

...Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) are pushing for the establishment of at least six new sites...

...There is a good deal of poignancy in these developments...

...The remains of Japanese soldiers who fought and died in that war still turn up beneath the plows of farmers tilling the soil...

...There would be sweeping compounds, glassware, rags, clothing, contaminated tools, and even some furniture—things like that...

...It wasn't until after Harvey left NECO in 1975 that the NRC (successor to the Atomic Energy Commission) began uncovering some hair-raising practices that had taken place at the Beatty dump during his regime...

...But if the wastes leak or the maintenance costs increase over the centuries, there is no way to go back to the original waste producer to collect the full cost...

...petition drives were begun, and soon delegates were off to Tokyo demanding a halt to the dumping plan...

...One-fourth failed to respond...

...As a consequence, seventy-year-old Tinian Mayor Felipe Mendiola, for one, is wary and adamant: "I heard that the Japanese government would come [here] again and again until we accept the plan...

...When solidified and packed into concrete blocks, these low-level "high activity" wastes (some are spiked with plutonium) require remote handling and special shielding at the dumpsite...

...Since the three existing commercial dumps—in Washington, Nevada, and South Carolina—will be filled long before then, the industry and the U.S...

...It was the nation's fourth commercial nuclear dump...

...Everybody liked him," Dr...

...Teledyne's technique is epitomized by full-page advertisements, illustrated with an idyllic scene, which Teledyne took out not long ago to announce that its wholly-owned subsidiary NECO (Jim Harvey's old outfit), would be changing its name...

...Among other steps, the government joined the London Dumping Convention and the surveillance group of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Nuclear Energy Agency...

...While three of the nation's six commercial nuclear dumps have been closed because of environmental pollution and the three remaining ones are drastically curtailing their intake, the wastes are piling up at university laboratories, hospitals, and factories at an ever-increasing rate...

...If the regulation of Fred Beierle and James Harvey and their various enterprises is any clue, the prospects are not promising...

...Just some dirty gloves and soiled gowns and paper from hospitals, laboratories, and nuclear power plants...

...By that time Fred Beierle was long gone...

...The U.S...

...The Japanese neglected to inform the people of the potentially affected islands, but the plans were reported in the regional press in February 1980, and the reaction was swift and strong...

...But some of it is so deadly that unless you stand several feet away you can get a fatal dose in four or five minutes...

...A company he once headed paid a $10,000 fine in Nevada and had its operations closed down altogether in Kentucky...

...But the two entrepreneurs have set an enduring style for the industry...

...What keeps Beierle and Harvey on the move is nuclear garbage dumping...

...So it appeared to officials of the Japanese government's Science and Technology Agency in 1972, when they began surveying the Pacific Ocean for sites to dump the mountains of nuclear wastes that have accumulated steadily on their crowded and heavily developed archipelago...

...Pressure from the press and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission finally forced the state to make the application public...

...At Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for example, radioactive waste from a Federal dump site has leached into a creek that flows into the Clinch River...

...When the AEC discovered there was a cheaper way to get rid of its low-level radioactive wastes, NECO—with Harvey as vice president—got in on the ground floor of the nuclear land-dump business...

...He opened a storefront office on the town square, rented a house, bought a pickup truck and cowboy boots, and made friends at the Chamber of Commerce...

...The lease between California Nuclear and the state was approved in 1966...

...While the Japanese government has temporarily suspended plans to carry out the dumping, the issue is still pressing...

...If you're interested, contact your governor...

...What kind of care have government and industry taken to protect the public and future generations—through the 1980s, the 2080s, and into the 3080s—from the unique long-term hazard presented by low-level commercial nuclear wastes...

...Now the NRC has retreated to the position that a "significant" public health problem exists only if the radioactivity from off-site migrations reaches a dangerous level...

...The opposition has now infected the Japanese home islands and forced the government to postpone—but not abandon—the dumping scheme...

...Hydrogen bomb testing has left Bikini Atoll and other areas off limits to humans, and radioactive elements already appear in alarming concentrations in fish and other sea life...

...Rickano's Kansas application is being held up by Governor John Carlin, who has called for a licensing moratorium on low-level waste sites until Kansas, following the dictates of the 1980 Federal law, can consider a regional compact with other states...

...Japan's fishing catch is the largest in the world, and much of the tuna and skipjack the Japanese eat is netted in the central Pacific where the dumping would take place...

...With radioactive waste as their specialty and chemical waste as a sideline, the two have made a name for themselves in the nuclear industry...

...Once the waste is turned over to the dump, the utility is off the hook...

...They are toxic for thousands of years...

...Vociferous opposition to the plan spread quickly throughout the islands, especially in the Marianas, which include Saipan, Tinian, and Guam, and in the newly inaugurated Republic of Belau (Palau...

...He quit GE in 1959 and went to work as operations manager for Nuclear Engineering Company (NECO), a company that had a Federal Government contract for tossing radioactive wastes overboard in fifty-five-gallon drums in the Pacific off the California coast...

...The company hopes to acquire at least one-third of the six to ten new dump sites it expects to see opened by 1990...

...Department of Energy dumps low-level radioactive waste from its nuclear weapons program...

...By the year 2000, commercial nuclear wastes from all sources—hospitals, universities, and industrial establishments as well as power plants—will have topped one billion cubic feet...

...The wastes include evaporator bottoms, sludges, spent resins, and filter slurries...

...Many states apparently keep no track of nuclear waste-generating facilities within their borders...

...For Beierle's partner, James Harvey, the vicissitudes of the business are much the same...

...First, the islands have already been directly exposed to the consequences of nuclear pollution...

...Chem-Nuclear Systems, Inc., with revenues up from $46 million last year to an estimated $70 million this year, has expanded into the highly lucrative business of solidifying nuclear wastes at the generating sites...

...Much of the material dumped into the shallow trenches of the commercial dumps is, indeed, only lightly contaminated...

...A former reactor operator at the Hanford, Washington, nuclear weapons plant, Beierle started a partnership called California Nuclear in 1963 and began transporting nuclear wastes...

...Because nuclear wastes—unlike most other forms of garbage—remain toxic virtually forever, Dump and Run means that Americans and their descendants are being left with a cleanup problem of unprecedented proportions...

...The company expanded into dumping in 1965, when Beierle got a license to bury commercial radioactive waste at the Hanford reservation...

...As Northern Marianas Governor Carlos Camacho said on a recent trip to Tokyo: "The sea and the islands, inhabited or not, should never be thought of as a dumping site...

...Beierle and Harvey aren't waiting for a consensus...

...It wasn't the qualified geologists, geo-chemists, and hydrologists of the U.S...

...Legislatures on Guam and in the Northern Marianas immediately passed resolutions against the dumping...

...The names of the shippers are generally known, but not the producers of all nuclear wastes—nor the amounts they generate...

...The high-level wastes, much smaller in volume but more lethal for much longer periods, present a separate but even more difficult disposal problem...

...He scouted around the county and asked a local real estate dealer to find a rundown farm," recalls Dr...

...At a hearing in 1976, a worker from the Beatty dump told the NRC it was common practice there to break open the crates of radioactive debris and sell the plywood as construction material for fences, sheds, and playhouses...

...So what's new about that...

...The current regulatory retreat, the efforts to throw the problem into the laps of the states, and the prospect of exponential growth in the volume of low-level commercial wastes—with more nuclear plants coming on line—are conditions made to order for the dump-and-run boys...

...Early this year they bought the Carey mine and twelve acres of shaft and tunnel for $350,000...

...State Senator Jack Janssen obligingly rushed a bill through the Kansas legislature that would permit the mine owners to transfer the property to the state (for perpetual care) and then lease it back to the company (for interim profits...

...Department of Energy now is embarked on a crash program to try to solve that problem by the mid-1980s...

...They had better give up the plan since it is so unreasonable: to take its own waste to other people's places—using only the useful part of nuclear power and dumping dangerous waste into Pacific waters...

...They made inquiries among the Kentucky dairy farmers and hollow dwellers near Maxey Flats—and then launched an anti-dump petition drive...

...The initial reaction was enthusiastic when Beierle told the local newspaper that the "chemical" plant he planned to build near Cooper would employ up to fifty workers and have an annual payroll of $200,000...

...Baker recalled...

...For these and other transgressions, NECO in 1977 paid a fine of $10,000—small potatoes to the multi-billion-dollar Tekdyne Corporation, which by then had become its parent company...

...Sheffield's twenty trenches were filled with more than three million cubic feet of radioactive wastes, some of it seeping into the underlying groundwater, when the state, stuck with most of the cost of perpetual care, closed it for good on April 9,1978...

...Government and industry refer euphemistically to commercial nuclear garbage as "low-level waste" to distinguish it from more intensely radioactive fission products (mainly the wastes from reprocessing spent fuel used at military and civilian nuclear reactors), which must be isolated for even longer periods (a quarter of a million years when plutonium is involved...

...Most of the toxicity in commercial nuclear plant low-level wastes comes from cleaning up the cooling waters that circulate about a reactor's radioactive core...

...The cumulative effects of 1950s-era fallout, the basing of nuclear-powered ships and submarines in Pacific waters, and the proposed dumping represents a serious threat to the habitability of the region...

...Other islands followed suit...

...As the proposed charter for a nuclear-free Pacific reads, "Only one nuclear submarine has to be lost in the sea, or one nuclear warhead dumped in our ocean from a stricken bomber, and our livelihood is threatened for centuries...

...Recently the NRC sent a bulletin to its 4,400 licensees asking for the volumes of radioactive waste they had shipped...

...There are seventy-one operating nuclear reactors with ninety new plants under construction...

...here in Kansas, hiding behind a paper mask, thinking we're a bunch of country yokels waiting to be plucked...

...There is precious little space in Japan for anything like safe disposal of the wastes of this nuclear industry, and the citizenry will not tolerate much additional environmental damage or danger in Japan itself...

...Finally,, of course, Pacific opposition to the dumping is rooted in the utter dependence of the islanders on the health of the South Seas...

...The dump operators make their own site selection and monitor their own activities for the state and Federal governments...

...Last January, Beierle and Harvey met with a group of Kansas legislators to discuss the formation of a compact with other states for low-level radioactive waste disposal...

...Doesn't every business have its shady operators...

...Fees paid by utilities may be adequate in the short term and may even yield a profit to the dump operator...

...So too have campaigns calling for the prohibition of storage, testing, and deployment of nuclear weapons—and the introduction of nuclear energy in the islands...

...Even before they were convinced of the dangers of dumping, however, islanders were ready to fight the nuclear contamination of the sea...

...With a year's notice, the dumping could begin...

...And the industry is currently pressuring the NRC to retreat still further by acknowledging that a problem exists only if radioactive seepage from nuclear garbage dumps can be shown to contaminate the drinking water of identifiable individuals...

...They said the workforce would be about fifty and the payroll about half a million dollars...

...Leaving day-to-day operations in the hands of co-workers at the Hanford site, Beierle headed east...

...As Science magazine puts it, "Maxey Flats is now something of an albatross around Kentucky's neck...

...32 I DECEMBER 1981 dies 85 to 90 per cent of U.S...

...Beierle was undaunted...

...Lamar County's five commissioners unanimously approved a resolution urging him to go peddle his dump somewhere else...

...There were plenty of them in 1965...

...Then the troubles began...

...They are given a free (and sometimes a helping) hand by their supposed regulators, who reflect the pressures and values of the industry...

...In Illinois, the Attorney General has filed suit to recover the $97 million it would cost the state to clean up the mess it inherited after Beierle showed up fifteen years ago...

...The sites were picked by industry operators juggling political and economic criteria...

...Barring an abrupt turnabout in public sentiment, the most likely fate for Maxey Flats is that it will be kept closed and foisted on the Federal Government for perpetual care...

...Securities and Exchange Commission in its annual statement last January, "To a large degree, the company's long-term growth will be dependent on the acquisition and development of additional nuclear and chemical waste disposal sites...

...Absolutely no use...

...The style is: Dump and Run...

...But it is no use...

...Beierle lost out in Delta County, and then in adjacent Lamar County, where he turned next...

...There is speculation they may resell it at a profit to Chem-Nuclear, which, as operator of the Barnwell, South Carolina, dump, now hanDeep-Sixing the Atom The deep-sea disposal of radioactive wastes is attractive to the nuclear industry in part because there are no mid-ocean farmers or schoolteachers to arouse neighbors and friends to backyard dangers...

...One of them...

...Beierle's California Nuclear picked up a farmed-out twenty-acre place a few miles northeast of the town...

...Together they have either established or played a major role in developing five of the six commercial nuclear waste dumps that have been licensed in the United States...

...And in Kansas, another Beierle venture recently prompted a leader in the state legislature to warn his fellow lawmakers to be on guard against "a paper company...

...A solution of sorts might be modeled on the experience of the chemical industry, for which, a year ago, Congress established a $1.6 billion "superfund," financed largely from a tax on petroleum and other chemicals, to cover the costs of cleaning up hazardous chemical dump sites...

...A second source of opposition is deep-seated distrust of the Japanese—a broad and bitter memory of their colonial rule hangs on stubbornly in the region...

...Kentucky closed the site, paid the company $1.27 million for its remaining lease rights, and assumed the annual maintenance costs, which are estimated at $100,000...

...so we have changed it...

...Over the years we have demonstrated there are environmentally safe methods of managing waste," the ad reads...

...While Jim Harvey was cutting his teeth at Beatty and Maxey Flats, Fred Beierle was getting started on his own...

...Wastes are accumulating rapidly and domestic pressure to dispose of them can only mount...

...Current estimates are that by 1990 the nation's power reactors will produce enough commercial waste each year to cover 297 football fields...

...It is a critical moment: Once the waste is dumped, it will rest on the ocean floor forever...

...There is no information being withheld that the public needs," said Gerry Soltenberg, the Division's deputy director...

...University of California scientist W. Jackson Davis, for example, analyzed the Japanese environmental impact documents for officials in the Marianas and attacked what he considers seriously erroneous estimates of the likelihood of waste radioactivity entering the food chain...

...Arriving one day in the town of Cooper, Texas, about 100 miles northeast of Dallas, Beierle took out an option to buy 300 acres of prime grazing land...

...How well is the public likely to be served by a President and a cooperative Congress bent on helping the nuclear industry recover the vigor it once knew...

...Like the nuclear industry itself, the nuclear dumping business is prone to questionable practices because, in large part, it regulates itself...

...His eye fell on the northern Illinois farm town of Sheffield, about 120 miles west of Chicago...

...For decades they have been kept in "interim" storage at nuclear weapons plants and at power reactor sites while the Government ponders various methods and sites for permanent disposal...

...The state stepped in and finally wound up buying off NECO...

...Chem-Nuclear (Fred Beierle's old outfit), looking for growing room beyond its present base at Barnwell, South Carolina, told the U.S...

...Our name should more accurately reflect this role...

...At Maxey Flats, rainwater seeped through the unsealed burial trenches, contaminating the nearby hills and hollows with radioactive tritium, cobalt, strontium, and cesium...

...It is for our children and our grandchildren, both in the Pacific and Japan, that we strive now...

...They settled on a site halfway between Japan and the Mariana Islands and made preparations to begin test dumping in 1981...

...Max McDowell, a journalist turned anti-nuclear crusader, is convinced that the Rickano Corporation application is just a stalking horse for fulfillment of the Federal Government's decades-old plan to make Lyons the permanent repository for all the country's high-level nuclear wastes...

...Neither the NRC nor the state regulatory agencies nor anyone else has a handle on the radioactive waste disposal industry as a whole...

...Beierle is no longer on the scene, but his spirit lives on in the person of Chem-Nuclear's LeRoy B. Hebbard Jr., who is fond of telling listeners that Barnwell is so sanitary "you can send your children out to play on the trenches," and that some of the trucks leaving the dump site are clean enough to carry baby clothes...

...For good measure, the commissioners of a third Texas county, Fannin, voted against a waste dump, too, just in case Beierle had a notion to head their way...