=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #192
—August 1, 1990—
News and resources for environmental justice.
——
Environmental Research Foundation
P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403
Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: erf@igc.apc.org
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INCINERATOR ASH–PART 4: DUMP NOW, LET THE CHILDREN PAY LATER.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, engineers and scientists employed
by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and by private
manufacturers of nuclear power plants, like Westinghouse, argued
that the solution to radioactive waste disposal was to mix the
stuff with some self-hardening glop (asphalt, concrete, epoxy,
you name it) and bury it in a shallow grave, a landfill.
Starting in 1978, when Love Canal was discovered, the private
producers and government regulators of hazardous chemical wastes
argued that the solution to their problem was to mix it with some
self-hardening glop (asphalt, concrete, epoxy, you name it) and
bury it in a shallow grave.
Now that the people who used to make nuclear power plants are
making municipal solid waste incinerators instead, the
engineering world is buzzing with a “new” idea: the solution to
the problem of toxic ash waste is to mix the stuff with some
self-hardening glop (asphalt, concrete, epoxy, you name it) and
bury it in a shallow grave.
In the case of radioactive waste, the idea of self-hardening glop
and shallow disposal was completely rejected. Instead, the
decision was made to let the earth itself provide a barrier
between the wastes and the environment that people inhabit. So
the current plan is to bury high-level radioactive wastes half a
mile below ground in artificial caves made for that purpose. As
an added measure of protection, the radioactive material may be
solidified with some self-hardening glop (molten glass has been
discussed for this use for 20 years) before it is lowered into
the cave, but the main barrier between humans and the radioactive
danger is to be a half-mile of solid earth.
The reason self-hardening glop was rejected for radioactive
wastes is that there is no way to prove how long any
self-hardening agent will remain solid. A block of
concrete-and-mixed-waste today may crack and break into pieces
within a few decades, eventually turning back into toxic sand,
depending on what happens to it (in terms of chemical
environment, physical environment and geological forces) in the
future, and depending on what chemicals the original waste
contained. The same uncertainty plagues epoxy, asphalt, or any
other material you can name. And there is no way to test the
breakdown of self-hardening materials, except to give it a try,
and then wait and see what happens. This amounts to conducting an
experiment on our children, or upon THEIR children, and it is
obviously immoral and wrong. Who gives incinerator companies the
right to place toxic time bombs in the ground, waiting to
contaminate the nation’s water supplies and soils with a potent
neurotoxin like lead? Our children are already dangerously
contaminated with lead (see RHWN #189). The chemical waste
producers are willing to experiment on our children, and the
garbage incinerator people seem positively eager to conduct such
experiments–they’re ready to bury new mixtures of glop and
highly toxic ash in shallow graves tomorrow morning, if we’ll let
them.
In the case of solidifying hazardous chemical wastes, the EPA
(U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) has set up a program
called SITE (Superfund Innovative Technology Evaluation–see RHWN #150)
to evaluate different kinds of glops and their abilities to
solidify different kinds of hazardous wastes. The program began
three years ago and will run for a decade or more. The SITE
program recognizes that each kind of waste requires a different
kind of glop, and many wastes can’t be successfully solidified at
all. Predictably, the SITE program has been unable to answer the
key questions that plagued all proposals a decade earlier to
solidify radioactive waste: the Congress’s Office of Technology
Assessment evaluated solidification technologies used in
Superfund cleanups (see RHWN #87) and pointed out (a) There is no
standard test for deciding whether a waste has been
“successfully” solidified; and (b) There is no way to gather data
on the long-term stability of a solidified waste except to wait
and see what happens as time passes. In other words, a
trial-and-error experiment on our children is the only way to
find out if solidifying toxic wastes really works.
The garbage incinerator people don’t seem to care about these
insurmountable technical difficulties. They argue strenuously, in
public meetings, in newspaper articles, and in flawed technical
articles [1] that they have found a solution to the toxic
incinerator ash problem; in fact, they argue the ash isn’t really
“toxic” at all, even though it has 2,500 to 6,000 parts per
million (ppm) of toxic lead in it. (Some ash has upwards of
20,000 ppm lead in it.) The garbage incinerator industry is now
conducting a nationwide PR campaign to convince everyone that
incinerator ash has “pozzolanic” characteristics, which is to say
the stuff will harden like cement, and that this will prevent the
toxic metals in the ash from escaping into the environment where
it would make humans sick. They have a small amount of data
showing that some ash wastes, mixed with lime or cement, do
harden, but they have absolutely no data on the long-term
reliability of the hardening process because they have not been
doing it for long. They are simply willing to wager our
children’s health and safety that their process will remain
stable for the duration of the hazard, which is thousands of
years. (What they’re really betting is that they’ll be gone by
the time serious problems become apparent–it’s the familiar
“dump now, let our children pay later” principle that brought us
Love Canal and every other Superfund dump.) It is a travesty of
good science and engineering, and serious violation of public
health principles, which demand “safety first.”
By reading engineering manuals and textbooks [2] on cement, one
can readily compile a list of known factors that make it
impossible for cement and ash mixtures to protect public health
reliably in the long run (we’ll only list a few here):
1) Cement is a mixture of four main chemical compounds; to harden
satisfactorily and remain strong, the four chemical compounds
must be present in the proper proportions, and other chemicals
(such as sulfates, and organic material), which interfere with
the reactions, must NOT be present. [3]
The “aggregate” (usually gravel when cement is made on a
construction site, but ash in the case of a toxic ash
solidification project) must be uniform in size and chemical
composition. This requirement is impossible to meet in the case
of mass burn ash.
The chemical composition of incinerator ash varies widely from
place to place and day to day (even hour to hour). This is a
natural result of the garbage itself varying widely from place to
place and day to day. One day the garbage is mostly industrial
trash; another day it’s full of organic matter. There is no way
around this problem in a mass burn incinerator (one that burns
garbage without any processing before the burn).
Other factors that cause variability in the ash are the
incinerator design, the actual combustion conditions (which
vary), and the air pollution controls (for example, presence or
absence of lime scrubbers).
2) Incinerator ash has a highly variable salt content, and many
kinds of salts interfere with the proper hardening of cement.
3) It is widely agreed that an alkaline environment must be
maintained to prevent leaching of metals from ash, even
solidified ash. Since rain is acid (not alkaline) by nature, rain
will eventually change any alkaline landfill environment into a
neutral, or slightly acidic environment, and leaching of metals
will then proceed.
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.
===============
[1] For example, see footnotes 1 and 2 in RHWN #191 last week.
Descriptor terms: incinerator ash; msw; incineration; cement;
concrete; solidification; stabilization; hlw; radioactive waste;
SITE program; epa; toxic waste; alternative treatment
technologies;