South Carolina nuclear plant's radioactive waste will be sent to Idaho

The Augusta Chronicle, Ga. --Aug. 17--AIKEN, S.C.

Aug. 17--AIKEN, S.C. -- Savannah River Site will continue producing about 250 kilograms of radioactive neptunium 237 despite a decision to alter where it eventually will be sent, officials said Monday.

The Department of Energy announced Friday that the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, which was selected in 2001 to receive the neptunium, did not have the security safeguards in place to store the material, which is harmful to humans and the environment.

Instead, the material will be sent to the Argonne National Laboratory-West in Idaho, where more protective security measures are in place, DOE spokesman Tim Jackson said. Similar materials already are stored there.

The change in destination will have no effect on the production of neptunium 237 at SRS, said Fran Poda, a spokeswoman with Westinghouse Savannah River Co., which runs SRS for the Energy Department.

It will take about 300 workers at SRS between 14 and 16 months to produce the neptunium.

Though the neptunium will be shipped and stored at Argonne, the DOE hasn't decided whether that facility or Oak Ridge will use it to produce plutonium 238, which will be used to power future space missions.

That project is valued at $200 million.

Savannah River Site created plutonium 238 as recently as 1995 that was used to power electrical systems on board NASA's Cassini probe, which reached Saturn at the end of June.

But the site doesn't have a reactor capable of converting the neptunium 237 into plutonium 238, a process that happens when the neptunium is bombarded with neutrons, Ms. Poda said.

"We were never in the running" for that project, she said.

SRS also doesn't have the capacity to store the neptunium after it's converted from a liquid into a stable oxide form, Mr. Jackson added.

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