Fayetteville City Council to consider taking SEFOR wastewater for processing

Visitors examine the reactor Jan. 19 during a tour of the shuttered SEFOR nuclear facility near Strickler in southern Washington County. Visit nwadg.com/photos to see more photographs from the tour.
Visitors examine the reactor Jan. 19 during a tour of the shuttered SEFOR nuclear facility near Strickler in southern Washington County. Visit nwadg.com/photos to see more photographs from the tour.

FAYETTEVILLE -- Local, state and national experts agree the radiation levels of wastewater from the deactivated nuclear reactor in Strickler verge on nonexistent, making it safe to process in the city's public sewer system.

photo

File Photo/NWA Democrat-Gazette/ANDY SHUPE

Visitors and officials from the University of Arkansas and Energy Solutions speak Jan. 19 during a tour of the shuttered SEFOR nuclear facility near Strickler in southern Washington County.

The city has accepted wastewater from the Southwest Experimental Fast Oxide Reactor before. In 2011, the University of Arkansas, which owns the site, released about 38,000 gallons that had accumulated in the basements of two support facilities, said Mike Johnson, associate vice chancellor of facilities. The water accumulation was attributed to leaky roofs, which have been repaired.

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Meeting information

What: City Council

When: 5:30 p.m. May 2

Where: Room 219, City Hall

113 W. Mountain St.

Web watch

To read the the reports, go to:

http://nwaonline.com">nwadg.com

The water has reappeared. Facilities managers believe groundwater may have infiltrated the basements. The City Council will take up a proposal May 2 on whether to accept about 70,000 gallons of wastewater from the site.

The reactor was built in 1968 with money from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. From 1969 to 1972, workers generated heat out of the 20-megawatt reactor, which was never hooked up to any turbine machinery used to produce electricity. Operations ceased with the university taking ownership of the site in 1975 to use for graduate student research. It fell out of use by 1986.

The U.S. Department of Energy provided the university a $10.5 million grant to clean the site. Phase I entailed outlining what the decommissioning process would look like. Phase II, the current status of the project, will see the two support buildings razed. Phase III will take out the reactor and restore the land.

A contractor for the university and the state Department of Health tested the water and came up with the same conclusion. Results showed an "exempt quantity" of tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen, meaning the water is safe, below regulatory requirements, said Jared Thompson with the Department of Health's Radioactive Materials Program.

Radiation isn't an uncommon feature in water systems, Thompson said. There's probably more radiation in a person's body than is in the wastewater at SEFOR, he said. The amount of tritium from the test is about 1/1000 of the amount acceptable for drinking water.

"It's a question of concentration," Thompson said. "It's like anything else, if you have arsenic in water, it's the concentration that poses the problem. Same thing with radiation. If you have a high enough level, sure, you're going to have some problems."

If the measurements had been higher than the acceptable threshold, then the water would be shipped to one of four low-level waste disposal sites in the United States, the closest of which is in Texas, Thompson said.

"You can't get rid of all of it," he said. "Some of it's just there naturally, and you have to have certain limits."

CH2M Hill, a global environmental and engineering company, operates the city's wastewater treatment facilities. The city has its own water standards and the levels found at SEFOR fall far below them, said Denise Georgiou, industrial pretreatment coordinator.

University officials did asbestos abatement in the piping at the site in 2011 and no asbestos was found this time around, Georgiou said. The amount of tritium in the 2011 wastewater was far higher, although still minuscule, and resulted in no adverse effects, she said.

The city will charge the university a few hundred dollars to accept the wastewater in accordance with its usual rates, Georgiou said.

Crews will pump the wastewater from the basements into the contractor's 5,000-gallon truck and deposit it into a manhole near Baum Stadium. Up to four trucks per day over about a week should do the job, Johnson said.

University officials will continue to test for asbestos, and if any treatable amount is found, it will be filtered before loading the water into the truck, he said.

The water needs to be taken out so crews can get in and remove debris from the basements. It's a necessary step in the decommissioning process, Johnson said.

"In all honesty, we probably could just pump it out onto the ground or put it in an irrigation system," he said.

Disposing of wastewater from former nuclear sites such as SEFOR in a municipal sewer system is a common practice, often serving as the preferred way to deal with the material, said Kathryn Higley, professor and head of the School of Nuclear Science and Engineering at Oregon State University.

The human body has repair systems at the cellular level that take care of any damage caused by things such as free radicals and radiation is one source of a free radical. Tritium gives off a very low level of energy and can be difficult to find because of its weakness. Someone ingesting tritium wouldn't notice it, but exposure to extremely high doses over a prolonged period of time could cause problems with the cellular system, increasing cancer risk, she said.

Still, tritium is naturally occurring, and people get exposed to it and other forms of radiation all the time without knowing it, Higley said.

"You've got this constant signature of radiation and radioactive materials. Your dose changes if you hike up a hill -- you're closer to the sun and the cosmos and your natural radiation dose from cosmic radiation goes up," she said. "If you go sit in your basement and you have any sort of uranium in the soils around you then you might get a greater dose from radon. There's all these things where you just can't escape it."

Members of the Water, Sewer and Solid Waste Committee, consisting of half the City Council, showed hesitancy on the issue before forwarding the item to the full council without a recommendation either way during its April 11 meeting.

Alderman John La Tour said he needed more information before making a decision.

"I think a lot of people -- not necessarily of my political strife -- would be shocked to hear that we're taking radioactive water, or water with some degree of radioactivity," he said.

Alderwomen Sarah Marsh and Sarah Bunch also said they would look into the issue further before the next council meeting.

"If they're telling us it's safe, my inclination is to trust them," Marsh said.

NW News on 04/23/2017

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