March 2, 1999
NY Times

By MATTHEW L. WALD

WASHINGTON -- The Energy Department plans to announce this week that it wants to build two plants, at a cost of nearly $200 million each, that will gradually turn 1.5 billion pounds of depleted uranium into marketable products or waste that can be safely stored.

The uranium is now stored in canisters that can leak and give off toxic gas. The plants would process the uranium in a way that officials hope could help pay for itself.

The uranium, which is not highly radioactive, could be converted into a form useful for wrapping highly radioactive substances like reactor waste. The fluorine with which it is mixed could be sold for industrial use in petrochemicals, glass etching or steel processing, among others.

The government spends millions of dollars a year to scrape and paint the canisters in a losing battle against rust.

"This is the best thing that's happened in ages," said Donna Goodman, a hazardous waste inspector with the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and one of a small group of specialists who have been campaigning for better handling of the waste, leftovers of production of uranium for nuclear power and for bombs.

Some of the waste dates from the Manhattan Project, the secret World War II program to develop the atomic bomb, in the early 1940s. Some of the canisters, in fact, carry the Manhattan Project's initials.

But Ms. Goodman and others noted that it was not clear where the money to operate the factories, estimated at $50 million or more a year, would come from.

Under a law passed last year, the federal government is holding about $373 million for the factories. It is asking private companies for their proposals to use the money to build them.

The money was paid over the last few years by customers of plants that were then owned by the government and that process uranium for use in nuclear reactors, sorting out the type that splits easily, uranium 235. In addition, after the government sold those plants in a public stock offering last year, the new private entity that manages them, the United States Enrichment Corp., paid another $66 million to the government to handle the waste produced after privatization.

The "depleted" uranium that remains after most of the uranium 235 has been removed is almost entirely uranium 238, a material that is mildly radioactive and toxic; it is mixed with fluorine, a chemical that forms a compound with uranium that can be turned to gas for processing. But the compound, solid at room temperature, gives off a toxic cloud when it contacts water.

Experts hope that private companies will propose using the $373 million to build factories that will whittle away at the inventory over 20 to 30 years.

"We're very interested to see what industry does propose," an Energy Department official said. "We're looking for industry to give us ideas and input."

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who sponsored the law setting aside the $373 million, said on Monday in a statement that he was "encouraged that the Department of Energy has taken a first step in soliciting industry interest to begin cleanup" at two uranium enrichment plants in Paducah, Ky., and Portsmouth, Ohio.

But McConnell said that Congress was still waiting for the Energy Department "to come forward with a detailed legislative and budgetary proposal to solve this environmental nightmare."

For years, the Energy Department has avoided doing anything with the waste by declaring that it was not waste at all, but assets, despite the fact that there was no market for the material in its current form.

"It's only an asset if you change it to something else," said one Senate aide with experience in the issue. "Right now it's hardly what we'd consider an asset, but we're going to make the most of it."

Officials are eager to pay for at least part of the operating costs by selling recovered materials. They point out that depleted uranium is about 30 percent more dense than lead, and very good for shielding highly radioactive materials like spent nuclear fuel, even if the uranium itself is slightly radioactive.

For example, Starmet, of Concord, Mass., has a plan to use pellets of depleted uranium in place of the pebbles used to strengthen concrete; the product, which it calls Ducrete, blocks radiation three to four times better than the same thickness of concrete, according to Donald T. King, manager of sales and contracts at the company.

But the uranium would have to be "close to free" to make the product competitive in the marketplace, King said. He said that the Energy Department might be willing to give the uranium away to be free of storing it.

The fluorine, on the other hand, could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It makes up about a third of the inventory of 700,000 metric tons (about 1.5 billion pounds) and sells for up to $1,500 a metric ton in some chemical forms.

King said his company, which works with uranium-fluorine compounds at the Energy Department's Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., was already carrying out "fluorine mining" on a laboratory scale and was working toward building a pilot-scale plant.

The department's announcement will ask companies like Starmet what they would build, what chemical form the uranium and the fluorine would take and how they would market the materials.

But even the most optimistic experts believe that sales would merely help offset operating costs, not cover them.

One consultant who has worked on the matter and spoke on the condition of anonymity said operating costs were a big problem. "To say it's 'not clear,"' the consultant said, "is understating it."