UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Wednesday, July 14, 1993
7
Lack of toxic waste dump leaves University in lurch
By Carlos Tejada
Kansan staff writer
The test tubes, paper napkins and used rubber gloves found in yellow barrels in Burt Hall—the building that houses a doctor—do not look particularly dangerous.
However, they are low-level radioactive waste from labs at the University of Kansas. Because of recent problems with disposal facilities, the barrels may stay for quite some time, said Mike Russell, KU's environmental health and safety officer.
"We haven't really figured it out 100 percent vet." he said.
Robert Harder, secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, said KU had shipped its radioactive waste to a landfill in Barnwell, S.C., as part of the Central States Compact. However, on July 1 the compact — between Kansas, Arkansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Louisiana — was denied permission by South Carolina to ship its waste to Barnwell.
Harder said that Kansas and its
waste producers, including KU, the KU Med Center and Wolf Creek Nuclear Power Plant, now had no place to store waste.
"Kansas will have to do some problem-solving," he said.
Michael Lemon, KU radiation safety officer, said the university had several options for dealing with the waste. The best was to build a storage facility on West Campus for the 15 to 20 years of waste KU produces each year. The same radioactive waste would then be stored until the radiation wears away.
"We'll wait until the activity no longer exists," Lemon said.
He said most of KU's radioactive waste only had a six week half-life, so the amount of radioactive contamination would decrease by half every six weeks until no more radioactivity remained.
KU was to have shipped its waste to a disposal facility the compact was building in Boyd County, Neb. Harder said. However, the future of the site has become uncertain because of environmental concerns of Nebraska officials.
Steve Moller, policy research analyst for Nebraska governor Ben Nelson, said the state departments of Health and Environment had filed an intent-to-deny motion to keep the facility from being built for environmental reasons.
Charles Zidko, co-chairperson of Save Boy County, said the state's concerns were justified. He said the proposed site stood over a fresh water supply and was only forty miles downstream from the Missouri River. Such conditions violate Nuclear Regulatory Commission guidelines.
"It doesn't meet the conditions,
plain and simple." Zidko said.
He also said the compact and its contractor, U.S. Ecology, ignored a referendum in which more than 50 percent of Boyd County registered voters decided against building a waste facility.
"I don't think this is acceptable in any business," he said.
Steve Seglin, a lawyer for U.S. Ecology, denied the facility would cause an environmental hazard.
"U.S. Ecology is a responsible, professional company" he said
Task force to survey KU child care needs
Kansan staff report
A task force appointed last spring is preparing to survey the University of Kansas community's child care needs. Phone surveying will begin early this fall.
The 24-member task force, composed of Lawrence residents, KU faculty and students, was appointed by Ede Meyen, executive vice chancellor, to explore long-range child needs for the Lawrence campus.
"People know we need child care," said Ann Eversole, director of the Organizations and Activities Center and chair of the task force. "And we generally know we need infant and toddler care, but we don't know how much
Eversole said the telephone survey would sample a variety of students, both with children and without.
Eversole stressed that the child care task force expected to see results from the survey by spring
The task force is meeting twice this summer.
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