NUCLEAR WASTE WON’T GO THROUGH ARKANSAS

By Ray King/OF THE COMMERCIAL STAFF

Contrary to early reports, nuclear waste from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee that is being shipped to a disposal site in New Mexico will not be coming through South Arkansas.

“The initial reports got it wrong and confused Arkansas with Louisiana,” Dan Grene of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and Jared Thompson of the Nuclear Planning and Response Program of the Arkansas Department of Health said Wednesday afternoon.

“When shippers are going to transport hazardous materials there are shipping corridors established and Arkansas is not a shipping corridor for the material from Oak Ridge,” Grene said, adding that other hazardous materials frequently move through the state and the health department is notified about them in advance.

“The general public might not be told but Jared gets the word on all those things,” Grene said.

The material from the Oak Ridge Laboratory is called transuranic waste and includes byproducts of the Manhattan Project which were used to develop the first atomic bombs near the end of World War II, as well as clothing, lab equipment, tools and scrap that were contaminated by man-made radioactive isotopes, some with a half-life of 10,000 years.

Specially designed tractor-trailers will haul the material from the laboratory at Chattanooga, Tenn., to the New Mexico site, a 27-hour, 1,400 mile route that will go through Birmingham, Ala., then west on Interstate 20 through Mississippi and Louisiana.

The U.S. Department of Energy has estimated it will take 60 to 120 shipments each year for three years to move all the material, about 74,000 cubit feet of waste, from Oak Ridge to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.

Initial shipments of the material could begin by September, pending approval by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.