Nuclear Waste in Regular Landfills

This story was published on May 14, 2007, but it’s not one that got a lot of play, and it’s important. It appears that nuclear waste has been getting reclassified as “special” and then dumped in regular landfills. From the article:

Radioactive materials from nuclear weapons facilities are being released to regular landfills and could get into commercial recycling streams, finds a report issued today by the nonprofit Nuclear Information and Resource Service, NIRS. Radioactive scrap, concrete, equipment, asphalt, plastic, wood, chemicals, and soil are placed in ordinary landfills, researchers learned.

Contaminated by nuclear bomb production at Department of Energy, DOE, facilities, some of the radioactive waste is processed by state-licensed companies. In some cases it is “redefined” as “special” and then disposed of in regular landfills.

“People around regular trash landfills will be shocked to learn that radioactive contamination from nuclear weapons production is ending up there, either directly released by DOE or via brokers and processors,” says lead author Diane D’Arrigo, NIRS’ Radioactive Waste Project director.

“Just as ominous,” she said, “the DOE allows and encourages sale and donation of some radioactively contaminated materials.”

This free release opens up the potential for the materials to enter the recycling stream to make everyday household and personal items or to be used to build roads, schools, and playgrounds.
D’Arrigo and her team researched what happens to radioactive materials from the DOE national headquarters and seven nuclear sites – Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Rocky Flats, Colorado; Los Alamos, New Mexico; Mound and Fernald, Ohio; West Valley, New York; and Paducah, Kentucky.

The state of Tennessee is the most active state in licensing processors that can release radioactive materials for the nuclear waste generators, the report found. [full text]

It must be scary to live in the state of Tennessee and be reading this, thinking about how far away the nearest landfill is. I’m about to do a Google search to see how far away our nearest landfill is here in Eden Park, Cranston.

4 thoughts on “Nuclear Waste in Regular Landfills”

  1. We are tossing old smoke alarms into the trash, and even weirder things like anti-static devices containg Polonium, the radioactive poison that killed a Russian emigre. I wrote about it here in December, ‘Atomic Dustwipes and Other Nasty Trash.’

  3. I suspect far more harmful non-radioactive susbstances are being put into landfills than any radioactivity associated wth the materials mentioned in the quote above. People’s ignorance of the risks of radiation exposures compared to exposures to chemicals just leads to more public alarm as they don’t understand the risks of radioactivity. Americium is used in smoke detectors which is a decay product of plutonium but the chances of people getting exposed to quantities that would do any harm are negligible. The levels of radionuclides in the materials mentioned could well be comparable to the levels of radionuclides in coffee (including decaff). Environmental risk assessments and dose assessments will have been done to prove that this material will not have a detriment on the public and the environment and these would have had to been approved by the EPA. If I were you I’d get far more concerned about he levels of dangerous chemicals in landfills from the 1950s to 1980s and not about DOE building waste with low levels of radioactivity which will have a negligible effect on people or the environment.

  4. Thanks, Rob. Your perspective sounds quite knowledgeable and I appreciate your input.

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