Synthetic sludge may save taxpayers millions

Jim Krumhansl believes that his synthetic sludge could reduce the cost of decommissioning some radioactive waste storage tanks.

August 31, 1999
Web posted at: 12:20 p.m. EDT (1620 GMT)

Fake radioactive sludge that mimics the gunk found in underground nuclear waste storage tanks may help federal researchers save taxpayers millions of dollars, a scientist said at a recent meeting of the American Chemical Society.

Huge vats of radioactive sludge can be found in the wastelands of national laboratories all across the country — 180 tanks alone reside on the Hanford Reservation in the state of Washington.

"At this point there is no hesitation to clean up the sites due to cost, but if we can we leave it (the sludge) there, let's do that," said Neal Singer, a spokesman at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M.

Without knowledge of the threat posed by the nuclear waste, cleanup measures that pose no threat to the environment average about $65 million for every tank. However, the researchers think that some tanks can be simply decommissioned on-site at a cost of $10 million.

The Remote Telerobotic Vehicle for Intelligent Retrieval is a mobile robot developed by Sandia National Laboratories to help clean up DOE waste storage sites.

The synthetic sludge, developed by Jim Krumhansl at Sandia National Laboratories, is chemically similar to radioactive sludge — it just isn't radioactive. Thus lab workers can safely run tests to determine how much radioactive material the sludge stores or releases, and thus what cleanup steps are necessary.

"The decision how to treat these tanks ultimately depends on how much hazard there is from their residual radioactivity being able to move about. If virtually none of it goes any place, then you're a lot freer to do simple decommissioning techniques," Krumhansl said in a statement.

"The question is what fraction of radionuclides in the sludge will stay there indefinitely and what fraction could become mobile and enter the groundwater." If a tank can be decommissioned on-site, taxpayers would save $55 million.

The sludge was developed with a grant from the Department of Energy's Environmental Management Science Program. The researchers are in the second year of the three-year $1.2 million study.

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