Plan To Dispose Atom Waste Deep In Ground

Press, Volume XCVI, Issue 28448, 30 November 1957, Page 8

Plan To Dispose Atom Waste Deep In Ground

(From a Reuter Correspondent)

SAN FRANCISCO. The University of California has announced that it has begun a special research programme aimed at reducing the cost of disposing of radioactive material. The object of the study is to determine • the feasibility of injecting radioactive wastes directly into the ground without creating health hazards, such as the contamination of drinking water. At present, the waste material is taken out to sea and dumped. This process is expensive. Since the atomic age got under way less than 20 years ago, more than 15.000 steel barrels of waste material from reactors have been dumped in the Pacific off San Francisco alone. The material is sealed into steel and concrete drums and hauled about 30 miles out to sea, to a point off the Farrollone Islands. There, it is dumped into a hole 6700 feet deep. Most of this material has originated at the University of California radiation laboratories, and its volume is relatively small when compared with the atomic waste which accumulates at the nation’s other atomic plants.

From the Atomic Energy Commission installation at Hanford. Washington, more than 10,000.000 gallons of waste has been removed. The cost of disposal runs into millions of dollars a year. The economists concerned with the dollar and cents problems of industrial atomic uses hope that the cost may be reduced. The University of California believes that it may be on the way to finding the answer. The research is being sponsored by the university’s sanitary engineering department. The director is Associate Professor Warren J. Kaufman.

“If radioactive wastes could safely be placed directly into the ground without treatment and containment, the operating costs of any atomic installation would be reduced,” said Dr. Kaufman First results of the research nave indicated that two types of disposal systems appear most promising in terms of freedom from water contamination.

One of these could be used only in dry regions where there is little annual rainfall, and the ground water is several hundred feet below the surface. Under such conditions a surface or subsurface spreading system might be sufficient. For. as the radioactive liquid filtered down through the soil, it would give up its radioactive elements in exchange for certain of the soil’s elements.

“In this way,” explained Dr. Kaufman, “much of the radioactive portions of the waste material would become permanently locked in the soil. But this type of system would contain only a limited amount of radioactive wastes because disposal must be discontinued before contaminants reach the ground water. “A more attractive system of waste disposal is injection into deep formations well below the level of useful ground water. Deep formations generally contain connate, or fossil, sea water which has- moved little if at all since it was trapped there millions of years ago.

“Contamination of such connate waters would have no effect

on man, since they do not rise to the surface or intermingle with drinking water anywhere. These formations may well be far more permanent reservoirs than man is capable of devising artificially.” This “deep injection” method is already being used by the petroleum and chemical industries to dispose of certain waste materials.

“There is every indication that injection systems could be used foi confinement of radioactive materials just as well,” Dr. Kaufman said. “The important consideration is to provide assurance that no contamination of useful ground water results from waste disposal. “Such assurance can be gained only through an exhaustive knowledge of the direction and rate of travel of many radiocontaminants when introduced into formations of varying types of soil.”

The University of California researchers have studied approximate actual disposal conditions in a number of different soil types. This is accomplished by introducing radioactive tracers into glass columns filled with the soil sample. By analysing the liquid after it has passed through the column of earth, the ability of the soil to remove radio-contaminants from a waste can be 'measured.