The U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE) proposing to “release” for “limited use” millions of pounds of radioactive contaminated nickel which is currently being stored onsite at the Paducah, Portsmouth, and Oak Ridge DOE sites. This material was created (to the best of my knowledge) for the most part by the need for rebuilds of the enrichment cascades at the 3 current and former enrichment plants at the locations listed above. The Paducah facility has the most I believe. Over the years significant quantities of DOE scrap metal were both generated at Paducah and sent here because the Paducah site operated the only foundry in the DOE complex.

This nickel is “volumetrically” contaminated with uranium and all of the daughter products which include both transuranics and fission products. This is because it is my belief that this material was in continual contact with process gas in the enrichment “barriers,” and as we know, for a good bit of the time of the plant’s operation since 1952 feed stock was obtained from recycled reactor tails from the plutonium reactors primarily from the Hanford and Savannah river DOE sites. That’s the only way it could have gotten volumetrically contaminated in my opinion. Volumetrically contaminated metal means the radioactive elements have become part of the metal throughout and cannot be simply washed off the surface.

Back over a decade ago, the DOE valued the nickel at about $50 million if it could be used and proposed to invest any receipts from the nickel in cleanup at the sites. Those days are long gone. Now, with the speculative run-up on metals and other commodities, the value of the nickel has inflated substantially. With two of the enrichment plants closed and the other limping along on life support from the government, there are a number of economic development types that are desperate for any money that they can get. Community Reuse Organizations want DOE to give them the metal, and now the government wants it too. But re-couping value from it is totally contingent on removing the current obstacles.

These obstacles range from federal regulations making it almost impossible to release the metal for any use to the lack of a proven and safe technology for decontaminating it to strong public opposition to releasing it to past documented history of some of these materials making into the public commercial metal supply and likely being distributed to the public in common products.

When I chair of the Citizen’s Advisory Board at the Paducah site, I attended a presentation from a Canadian company that claimed that they could decontaminate the nickel safely. They would do this by gasifying the nickel with carbaryl gas and somehow separating the various gas streams. It has never been done on industrial scale, and carbaryl is very dangerous. I am worried about the safety of the process, and it would create a waste stream of transuranics, fission products, and uranium even if it is successful.

The Bush administration proposal is to amend the current regulations to allow the metal to be used in the nuclear industry. I’m not crazy about that, because that presupposes the continued growth of the nuclear industry, and not withstanding the current intense lobbying effort to re-establish the nuclear industry as a (false) savior of global warming, I do not think that nuclear power is part of a sustainable future. (at least the current fission based nuclear energy.)

Of course, the Paducah Sun, the most anti-environmental newspaper in the country editorially speaking, wants the nickel to be “cleaned” and sold to the general market. They bemoan the regulations restricting their use. Any surprise there?

This material is substantially contaminated, is very radioactive, and needs to be well contained. That’s my recommendation.