(The following story by Frank Munger of the Knoxsville News-Sentinel was published in that paper’s online version on January 28)
OAK RIDGE, Tenn. — The government’s cleanup manager has temporarily halted rail shipments of hazardous waste because of an incident last week in which a waste container spilled some of its contents.
Bechtel Jacobs Co. is investigating the incident, which was discovered Jan. 22 when a rail shipment arrived at the Envirocare landfill in Utah. The U.S. Department of Energy requested the fact-finding probe.
Paul Clay, vice president and deputy general manager of Bechtel Jacobs, said a small quantity of low-level radioactive sludge spilled when a lid on one of the metal boxes became dislodged during the trip from Oak Ridge to Clive, Utah. The dried sludge was contained inside the car and posed no threat to the public or the environment, he said.
Based on early information, it appears the rail car was jolted in such a way that the wood braces came loose, allowing the metal boxes to shift inside the car, Clay said. Officials suspect the incident occurred in St. Louis, where the rail shipments were transferred from Norfolk Southern to Union Pacific, he said.
“It appears to us that there was some kind of severe jostling, severe enough to cause one of the lids to open and spill a small amount of waste,” the Bechtel Jacobs executive said Tuesday.
“We’ve had 14 shipments of the same stuff go the same way prior to this without incident,” he said.
Clay said two Oak Ridge employees, including a transportation expert, were dispatched to Utah to look at the damaged boxes and collect information on the incident. Bechtel Jacobs will report its findings to DOE by Feb. 22, he said.
The waste shipments were the responsibility of Westinghouse Safety Management Solutions-MK, a subcontractor to Bechtel Jacobs.
Clay said the sludges, which also contained small amount of hazardous chemicals, came from the West End Treatment Facility on DOE’s Oak Ridge. The sludges had been dried and treated with a polymer to prevent any leaching of the hazardous constituents, he said.
The waste shipments previously were transported to the Envirocare landfill by truck, but Bechtel Jacobs switched to rail transportation last fall as a cost-cutting measure, Clay said.