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In d. Nuclear By John Van Dalen Gamecock Staff Writer South Carolina Electric and Gas. Company is building a huge nuclear power generating station 30 miles from Columbia on the Broad River. Allied-Gulf Nuclear Services is constructing one of only four nuclear fuel reprocessing plants in the country near Barn well. Significant,too,is the fact that Westinghouse has been manufacturing uranium fuel rod pellets for some years at its plant off Highway 48 near Columbia. It is thus apparent that South Carolina is a state which the nuclear industry feels can absorb the expansion of sophisticated and controversial nuclear technology. South Carolina Electic and Gas Company's plant will produce electricity via steam conversion from a nuclear reactor. The plant at Barnwell, when completed, will receive spent uranium fuels in an irradiated form from nuclear generating stations throughout the Southeast . The major process at Barnwell is to refine and separate the uranium and plutonium fuels from each other and from the highly radioactive fission waste products. Fuel is thus enriched and made reusable for reactors. What all this amounts to is an added capacity to generate more electricity without resorting to increasingly costly fossil fuels such as coal and oil. However, nuclear technology creates deadly radioactive wastes, some losing half their radioactivity in as few as eight days, others taking as long as 24,000 years. These waste products are concentrated in liquid form and must not reach the en vironment. Containment of them is a high risk proposition and the disposal problem presented is perhaps the field of least technological sophistication in nuclear developmment. Radioactive Waste Reprocessed The Barnwell reprocessing facility will be receiving and processing approximately 45 tons of fission products annually. Scrubbing and purifying techniques remove over 99 per cent of fission products from gaseous vapor wastes, but small amounts of Iodine-131, Strontium-90, Cesium -137, and plutonium will be released to the atmosphere. High level radioactive liquid wastes are concentrated by evaporation, reduced in acidity, and buried in high-integrity stainless steel tanks until they are solidified or otherwise ultimately disposed of. These procedures are carried out behind massive shielding and are monitored for radiation levels along the entire process. At the SCE and G plant, core assemblies are transferred under water once they must be disposed of. William Willoughby, a senior, nuclear engineer with SCE and G said,"Radioactive material is traneferred from the reactor core by long handled tools and remote equipment. There is the possibility of fuel rods rupturing, but the surrounding water in which the CarneiAoring the pubAlic I ith/Ane Plant Wa procedure is carried-out would absorb the contaminants. In ad dition, the building has special ventilation systems to pick up additional contaminants that may be released from the water." In light of the inherent risks associated with the operation of a nuclear facility, especially a reprocessing plant, it is important to have some understanding of possible environmental and. biological harm that could occur should significant amounts of * radioactivity reach the en vironment, or else through time build-up to dangerous con centrations in human tissue. Radioactive Isotopes Dr. J.M. Dean, a biology professor at USC familiar with the status of South Carolina's nuclear development, talked about some of these ramifications from a biological standpoint. Determining factors include the type of energy emitter the particle is, the size of the particles, and dissipation and dispersal factors in the environment once an accident. or leakage has occurred, Dean a indicated. M Plutonium-239 is perhaps one of d the most toxic radionuclides in- e volved. It is an alpha emitter, h Dean explained, which means a there is a low energy level C emission over a very small g distance. The major danger is r inhalation of fine particles , a perhaps virus-sized, and then d injestion within tissues of the alveoli in the lung. There, a localized area of tissue can receive a cancer-inducung dose of radiation. I Bill Baehr, a health physicist at SCE and G was, however, op- q timistic about the containment of v plutonium. "I don't believe the I amount of plutonium will be t measurable at Barnwell," he said. a "It probably won't even be coming s out of the stacks because the v particles can't escape the con- e trolled areas of a reprocessing t plant." He said if some did escape, it would be an insignificant quantity. Dean explained that those radionuclides which readily substitute for natural elements within body tissue can most readily concentrate in that tissue. For example,Cesium -137 which has a half-life of 30 years substitutes for potassium. Hydrogen molecules under active synthesis can sub- s stitute radioactive tritium. Both Carbon-14 and radioactivea phosphorus (p32) are in termediate-level beta emitters. Contact with the human body at certain distances may penetrate the skin and concentrate in skinc tissue. Radioactive iodine (1 131 ) is a high-energy gamma emitter, Deanv said. It can build up and ultimately v destroy cells - that producesv thyroxine, leading to thyroxine deficiency or goiter, and possible tumors. The thyroid gland ist responsible for generally r regulating body metabolism.( iealth consequences, it should to a.sk hoail-sae . "vs. ste Haza And at Barnwell, significant rnouits of tritium will be stored ithin liquid waste. Dean -scribed tritium as a beta nitter which bonds readily with drogen molecules. One of the -tive sites of tritium con mntration in living organisms is in nadal DNA, thus the -productive systems could be itered and localized genetic Afects occur. Ultimate Waste Disposal Necessary The reason why plants like arnwell will present special roblems is that they handle large uantities of high-level radioactive 'astes which havetobe disposed of. ean feels that waste disposal ?chnology is the least developed spect of our increased nuclear )phistication. It is just not as ,ell-developed as core, fuel lement, or reactor design chnology, he said. Dr. Frank Caruccio, geology 7ofessor atr USC, also questions ie justification of continued iclear plant expansion when the sks and costs of waste con Linment are so high, and when ere may be only a 50-year supply 'uranium fuel. He noted that the tomic Energy Commission VEC) has yet to designate a site ir permanent disposal of >lidified nuclear wastes. It was itil recently speculated that )uth Carolina might be chosen for disposal area, probably at the EC Savannah River Plant. State officials publicly an )unced on June 14, however, that )uth Carolina was no longer in )nsideration as a "dumping ound for high level radioactive astres." Written assurances ere received from the director of aste management and tran ortation for the AEC in !ashington. Several factors could have been e determinants in the Coin tission's reasoning to strike South arolina from its list. One may e incumbent mergency systems am rds Exan have been precipitation and moisture considerations of the state's climate; the other may have been the very significant seismological factors. The eastern half of South Carolina is classified as a zone three risk area for earthquakes. This is the same classification that the San Andreas fault area in California has. It corresponds to intensities of VII and higher on the Mercali scale. Dr. Caruccio ex plained that this classification was based largely on a major ear thquake in 1886 the epicenter of which was near Charleston. The Barnwell plant is designed to withstand a quake of VII to VIII intensity according to the January, 1974 Barnwell environmental statement. Dr. Caruccio said it was very dificult to predict any occurrence of an earthquake in South Carolina because rock faulting is buried 1,000 feet below sedimentary strata, and thus no surface ex pressions of the faulting can be seen. Small quakes tr that have occurred near Bowman give an orientation to fault location, but continuous monitoring is necessary. Finally, substantial amounts of stronium-90, infamous from the days of atmospheric bomb testing, will be concentrated within liquid wastes at Barnwell. Stronium-90 substitutes almost without discrimination for calcium. It builds-up in bone tissue and can result in tumor sites and have harmful effects on blood cell reproduction in children. Stronium-90 can pass very readily through the food chain, the most well-known path being fall out from the atmosphere onto grass or vegetation consumed by animals such as dairy cows and then into milk. But significant quantities of Strontium-90 have been discovered in creeks near the huge reprocessing facility at West,Valley, New York, so that underground water can also become contaminated. Questions Must Be Asked One positive factor about the site at Barnwell is the ion exchange capacity of the soil which means that radioactive wastsian be <iined contained within clay strata beneath the site. Further movement of the wastes to an eventual surface run-off area is thus halted or slowed down. Dr. Caruccio's research in dicates that the migration flow time of water from the plant site, underground to final discharge at Lower Three Runs Creek, would be 1,550 years. This figure is com patible. with another reached during earlier, preliminary en vironmental studies at the site. Barnwell is expected to be completed by 1977 or 1978. An operating license from the AEC is a matter of course. Preliminary environmental studies, and safety research analysis have been ex tensive and thorough. . But hard questions must be asked so that quality and standards of operation can be upgraded. For example, spent reactor fuel waste will be transferred by truck in double-walled steel containers to reprocessing facilities such as Barnwell. Can the integrity of these containers be guaranteed against potential truck collisions at high speeds on interstate high ways? Also, in the light of recent controversy, how reliable are the emergency core cooling systems (ECCS), which are the primary safeguards in the event of a loss of cooling water to the extremely hot reactor core area? Melting of the core could occur if this emergency "brake" system did not function. In other words, considering public health consequences , it should be incumbent to ask how fail-safe are emergency systems and radioactive detectors, not just what is the probability of such and such an accident occurring. During the past two months, there have already been three accidental radioactive releases in South Carolina. One of these was a tritium vapor emission at the AEC Savannah River Plant, and another was a release at the nuclear power plant near Harts ville. This fact remains: high level radioactive wastes will be around for a long time. Furthermore, the AEC has not yet decided on a federal repository for them, and it is not likely that many states will volunteer- a se either