Fernald shipping radioactive Mallinckrodt wastes "temporarily" to Texas

[struggle4progress]

Radioactive waste will roll through area <St Louis MO>
By Elizabethe Holland Of the <St Louis>Post-Dispatch
06/04/2005

<snip> More than half of the waste will be making its second visit here. It came from the Mallinckrodt Chemical Works on the riverfront just north of downtown. Mallinckrodt, an atomic-age pioneer, altered the course of World War II by developing a way to purify uranium to the grade needed to make the atomic bomb.

After the war - in the 1950s - 6,000 tons of radioactive byproducts from the processing were shipped to a uranium processing plant northwest of Cincinnati, where it was kept in silos. There it has stayed for the last half-century. But now the Department of Energy is intent on cleaning up the site at Fernald, Ohio, and shutting it down for good because it's located near a major water supply and heavily populated areas. That means finding yet another home for the waste.

The department has chosen a temporary site in Texas, which means that the waste will be carted on flatbed trailers and sent along highways that snake through the Metro East area, south St. Louis County and westward to Texas. The site in Texas is not near a water supply and is in a less populated area. It is also drier in Texas, and so drainage problems from the site would be minimal. <snip>

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/stlouiscitycounty/story/1D6508C16E54619B86257016000F68B5?OpenDocument

Yall be nice and give W a big frindly thank-ya, ya hear?

[fasttense]

1. Just because you folks spawned him doesn't mean

he's going to go easy on ya. Perhaps this is way of saying thank you.

[derby378]

6. You keep forgetting...

* is a native of Connecticut.

George W. Bush isn't a Texan, but he plays one on TV.

[carpetbagger]

2. If it's gotta go somewhere, might as well be Andrews County.

For those unfamiliar with that area, it's pretty much oilfields and denuded, overgrazed, brush that might have been marginal and transient grassland once upon a time.

And by the way, it went 85-15% for Bush last election.

[struggle4progress]

3. Ya ain't worried about the Ogallala aquifer? eom

[carpetbagger]

5. Good point.

I thought the aquifer ended north of there.

Whatever happened to the Sierra Blanca plans?

[VelmaD]

4. Yeah, but think of all the places...

it has to go through to get there. How many major cities where the damage could be enormous if there was an accident? How many small towns that don't have anything near the resources to deal with it if there's an accident there? And what about the aquifer? It's a disaster waiting to happen.

[Algorem]

7. "Glow in the dark,you sumbitches"is what I heard someone say.

http://www.cleveland.com/newsflash/cleveland/index.ssf?/base/news-17/1118078815119010.xml&storylist=cleveland

First of 2,000 radioactive waste shipments leave Ohio for Texas
6/6/2005, 6:02 p.m. ET
By LISA CORNWELL
The Associated Press

CINCINNATI (AP) — The first of an expected 2,000 shipments of Cold-war era radioactive waste left a former uranium-processing plant in southwest Ohio for Texas on Monday after neighbors fought for years to get rid of the waste and the government struggled to find a place to take it.

Two steel canisters, each holding about 20,000 pounds of a mixture of radioactive waste combined with fly ash and concrete were on the first truck bound for the storage site in Andrews, Texas, near the Texas-New Mexico state line. The truck left the long-closed Fernald plant site about 20 miles northwest of Cincinnati around noon on its 1,300-mile journey.

"I'm glad it's going," said Lisa Crawford, president of the Fernald Residents for Environmental Safety and Health that has lobbied for 20 years to clean up the site. "But wherever it goes, it needs to stay there. We don't need to be playing checkers with it."

The Fernald plant processed and purified uranium for use in reactors to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons from the 1950s until 1989. Eighty-five percent of the site's other wastes are to be permanently stored at Fernald, but the more radioactive silo wastes being shipped to Texas are part of the 15 percent to be sent elsewhere under the cleanup plan...

[BrightKnight]

8. Temporary

No Yucca Mountain type debates here. Bush and Perry sneaked this in under the radar.

I don't trust the word "temporary." It sounds like they have not done the necessary prep work? Is this really a proper site for storing 6000 tones of nuclear waste? Are the facilities appropriate? Is there such a thing as a temporary nuclear waste dump? Why not move the nuclear waste directly to a permanent site? Is this about passing the buck or solving the problem? Will this create a super-fund site in Texas?

You would think that a plan to ship 6000 tones of nuclear waste through the metroplex would get more media attention.

Did Toxic Tom sign off on this?