Battelle chosen to test storing radioactive waste undergroundJan 25 - McClatchy-Tribune Content Agency, LLC - Laura Arenschield The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio
For decades, the United States has produced nuclear energy and made weapons, creating nearly 100,000 metric tons of waste. So far, most of that waste has been stored mainly at the sites where it was created. But those sites were supposed to be temporary solutions. And over the years, the U.S. government has spent billions researching potential permanent places to store nuclear waste. Enter Battelle. The U.S. Department of Energy recently announced that Battelle would lead an effort to drill a test hole more than 3 miles below ground to see whether nuclear waste can be safely stored. The contract is worth $35.7 million to conduct the tests. The waste the government wants to store is from weapons and other U.S. Department of Defense activities, not from power plants. But if the test hole is successful, similar deep-drilled storage could be a solution to solving America's nuclear waste conundrum. "The primary focus is to collect data so that we can evaluate the safety of the (deep-drilled hole) concept," said Robert MacKinnon, technical manager at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. "That's the primary focus: Both pre-closure safety and post-closure safety. Safety to operations and safety to the environment afterward." The government has a few caveats for the test site: It has to be away from oil and gas activity. It has to reach a layer of geology that would be impermeable and suitable for containing dangerous substances. And it has to have a history free of earthquakes. The test site Battelle and its partners are looking at is located near Rugby, North Dakota, a town of fewer than 3,000 people that calls itself the geographic center of North America. One of Battelle's partners, the University of North Dakota Energy and Environmental Research Center, selected that site and is providing experts who understand North Dakota's particular geology. The center conducts extensive research on oil and gas drilling and oil and gas brine disposal, and researches a number of other issues connected with energy production. The test hole they are planning to drill is similar in construction to oil and gas wells or injection wells where oil and gas wastewater gets dumped. Injection wells for fracking wastewater in Ohio are drilled about a half a mile to 1.5 miles deep. The North Dakota test well will start out wide at the surface, with a steel-and-cement casing, then narrow as it gets deeper. Osborne said the geology 3 miles down is tight enough to contain nuclear waste, with no flowing water to carry it away or potentially bring it to the surface. The waste also will be placed in a container before it is buried. The drill team will use bits the size of tree trunks to drill the test hole, bury a non-nuclear sample and see what happens. Storage has been a conundrum for years. Scientists and policy makers have even considered burying waste deep in the ocean or even in space. For years, the federal government had planned to store nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain, near a nuclear test site in Nevada. But in 2010, the Department of Energy pulled its application for the site, which few seemed to support. Since then, the federal government has been searching for a solution. Rodney Osborne, manager of Battelle's energy business line, said it would take about two years to collect enough data to know whether the North Dakota site is viable. If it is, another test well will be drilled to gather even more data. "We don't know enough about this site yet," Osborne said. "We're just looking to understand the materials and the natural fractures. ... We want to follow the law and we want to make sure it's absolutely safe." larenschield@dispatch.com @larenschield http://www.energycentral.com/functional/news/news_detail.cfm?did=38565151 |