Here at our university we made use of the federally funded “Orphan Source” program to remove our old radioactive samples. Our contact for this was through http://www.crcpd.org/ which set us up with someone from the Illinois Emergency Management, Division of Nuclear Safety. The “Orphan Source” information came from the government site; http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/news/1999/99-128.html .
Kathleen Schmidt-Nebril, NRCC-CHO
Dominican University
Division of Chemistry
Department of Natural Science
River Forest, IL 60305
From:
DCHAS-L
Discussion
List [mailto:DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**list.uvm.edu] On Behalf Of Russ Phifer
Sent: Wednesday, November 18, 2009 10:35 AM
To: DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**LIST.UVM.EDU
Subject: [DCHAS-L] radioactive salts
A local laboratory here has four bottles of thorium and uranium salts they’d like to get rid of. Looking into it, I found it was going to cost close to $4000 to transport and dispose of less than a pound of material at a facility in Houston; this is the only facility I can find that will accept this material. These are not RCRA hazardous, and the radioactivity has to be extremely low. The DOT numbers are 2909 and 2910; there doesn’t appear to be any difficulty shipping them.
My question is – what are other labs doing to dispose of this type of material? Is it possible to encase them in concrete or another inert material and dispose in a municipal system? Is there anyone recycling these salts? Any ideas?
Thanks̷ 0;.
Russ Phifer
Russ Phifer
WC Environmental, LLC
1085C Andrew Drive
West Chester, PA 19380
610-696-9220x12/ fax 610-344-7519
rphifer**At_Symbol_Here**wcenvironmental.com
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