The first series of shipments of radioactive waste resulting from the Quehanna cleanup project in Clearfield County was completed this week. Ten sealed boxes, each containing about 500 cubic feet of low specific activity radioactive waste from the decommissioning project at the PermaGrain Products plant in the Quehanna Wild Area were shipped from the site on March 24.
The shipment is headed for a Cleveland, Ohio, railhead. The waste will travel by rail from Cleveland to the Envirocare disposal facility in Clive, Utah, where it will be buried.
In October, DEP began investigating a radiation incident that occurred during decontamination of buildings at the Quehanna Wild Area. According to DEP Environmental Surveillance Chief William P. Kirk, the incident occurred on state forest land operated by the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR), in a building which houses PermaGrain Products Inc.
The Commonwealth's contractor was removing a piece of contaminated equipment to a shielded storage area when the radiation was released inside one part of the building. There was no release of radioactive material outside the building.
Kirk said that one PermaGrain employee received surface contamination and was required to change clothes and shower before leaving the plant. Several employees of NES Inc., the Commonwealth's contractor, were slightly contaminated. As a precaution, two NES employees were monitored for internal contamination. All employee exposures were well below Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and state exposure limits.
When the release occurred, NES employees were following an NRC-approved decontamination plan for the removal of residual radioactivity - primarily strontium and cobalt - left over from industry operations decades ago. Decontamination of the site began July 10, 1998. The cleanup is continuing and there will be shipments of additional waste from the site in the future.
In 1955, 50,000 acres of state forest land was sold to the Curtiss Wright Corp., which developed nuclear jet engines and conducted research in nucleonics, metallurgy, electronics, chemicals and plastics. In addition to Curtiss Wright, various other industries using radiation in their manufacturing processes occupied the facility over several years.
The land was returned to the state in 1966 and now is managed as the Quehanna Wild Area in DCNR's Moshannon and Elk forest districts. Several buildings from the former industrial operations now are occupied by PermaGrain, a manufacturer of specialty wood and tile flooring.
The removal of legacy radioactivity, left behind in cells and related facilities by previous occupants, is being performed by Commonwealth contractor NES, Inc. of Danbury, Connecticut. NES and DEP's Bureau of Radiation Protection on-site inspectors ensured that the shipments met the waste acceptance criteria of Envirocare and U.S. Department of Transportation requirements for shipping this type of waste.
The waste includes material such as soil, concrete, rocks, piping, unusable equipment, duct work, used filters from the ventilation systems, cleaning supplies and a variety of other items that became contaminated with radioactivity during operation of the facility from 1955 through 1978. Most of the radioactivity in the waste is strontium-90.
The shipments did not include cobalt-60 sources, which have been removed from the cells using remote manipulators and packed in lead-shielded, steel shipping casks for transport to and burial at the Barnwell, S.C., low-level radioactive waste disposal site. The shipping of this material will occur after Chem-Nuclear Services, operator of the Barnwell site, assigns a burial date.