MDEQ presents TENORM report on radioactive waste

After waiting more than two hours in the audience for Van Buren Township officials to complete their regular meeting on April 21, representatives from the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality presented a report on disposal of radioactive fracking waste.
Jim Sygo, Deputy Director of MDEQ, introduced a contingent of a half-dozen representatives who came to give a presentation to the township on the fracking wastes reportedly heading to the hazardous waste landfill on the North I-94 Service Drive that caused such an uproar last summer.
Sygo said a trustee from the VBT Board wanted to sit on the panel the governor appointed to review the state’s policies on Technologically Enhanced Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials (TENORM).
[Actually, Scott Russell, who was a member of the Van Buren Public Schools Board of Education at the time asked the township board to nominate him for a seat on the Governor’s panel.] After reports in the Detroit Free Press that radioactive fracking waste was coming to the Belleville landfill early last summer caused a big hubbub, Gov. Rick Snyder directed the DEQ in August to assemble a panel to provide a technical review of Michigan’s disposal guidelines for TENORM to ensure protection of public health and the environment.
(Reportedly, the fracking waste expected never came to Belleville.)
After a study, in April a panel of radiation and health experts confirmed the DEQ’s disposal guidelines for low-activity radioactive materials.
Also, the 50 picoCuries per gram of Radium-226, established in 1999 by a U.S. Department of Energy study, was confirmed for all landfills.
The TENORM Disposal Advisory Panel also suggested hazardous waste landfills may have adequate protections to allow for higher concentrations.
Other recommendations included requiring landfills to place TENORM waste at least 10 feet below the bottom of the landfill cap, restricting the annual total volume of TENORM waste received at the landfills to minimize worker exposure, requiring landfills to monitor leachate and groundwater for Radium-226, and developing regulatory guidelines for the safe handling of TENORM contaminated with Lead-210.
The TENORM Disposal Advisory Panel investigated current federal and state standards, changes to risk methodology since the 1990s, the nature of how TENORM decays over time, methods of modeling dose assessment to workers and the public, and the design and operation of landfills.
Ken Yale, MDEQ’s Radiological Protection Section Chief, gave a PowerPoint presentation on the work done by the panel and then answered a series of questions from about a dozen members of the audience.
Dr. David Wilson, a retired chemistry professor from Vanderbilt University and a member of the VBT Environmental Commission, said he was concerned about blending waste.
He said how it is stored in the landfill is important because methane and CO2 coming up through the waste could carry radon.
“Radon does not react chemically. You cannot destroy it,” Dr. Wilson said.
Yale applauded Dr. Wilson’s comments agreeing, “We have to look at the biogenics.”
At the end of the three and a half hour township meeting, State Sen. Hoon-Yung Hopgood said, “We are taking a look at this issue in Lansing.”
He thanked the DEQ for coming down to VBT to report on the panel findings, but he thinks they should have a public hearing that is advertised widely.
VBT Supervisor Linda Combs asked Sen. Hopgood to sit down and talk with township officials about what they can do locally.
Supervisor Combs lives next door to the landfill and said she thought the operators were following the rules.
“We would vote no on this if we could,” said Clerk Leon Wright, referring to a hazardous landfill in the community.
“Tell us what we can do to support you in Lansing,” Clerk Wright said.
Also present at the meeting were State Representatives Kristy Pagan and Erika Geiss.
There were about 94 people at the township meeting at its 7 p.m. beginning, but as different issues were dealt with by the board, audience members left until there were about 40 when the MDEQ presentation started.