Belarus: Cleaning up Chernobyl???
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Proposed Biomass-Fired Power Plant Will Create Electricity While Clearing
Contamination in Belarus
LIVERMORE, Calif. - Ten years after the world's worst accident involving a
nuclear reactor, a collaboration of private business and researchers from the
United States and Belarus is planning to test a potential way to decontaminate
forests north of Chernobyl. The project will evaluate health, environmental, and
economic consequences of a pilot biomass power plant designed to burn timber
harboring almost all the radioactive residue, and capture radioactivity in the
ash.
Belarus is an independent state just north of Chernobyl. It received about 70
percent of the radioactive fallout released during the Chernobyl explosion and
subsequent fires. Altogether, the accident spewed an estimated 200 times the
radiation unleashed by the atomic bombs that were dropped on both Nagasaki and
Hiroshima, said Larry Baxter, a chemical engineer at Sandia National
Laboratories. Regions severely contaminated in the April 26, 1986 accident
represent approximately 25 percent of the total area of Belarus. The
contamination is concentrated mainly in the heavily forested southeast portion
of the country. Baxter and researchers at the Institute of Power Engineering
Problems, which was part of the Soviet Academy of Sciences under the former
Soviet Union, will join with Wheelabrator Environmental Systems Inc. of
Hampton, N.H., to build the pilot plant to convert contaminated wood and litter
from the forest floor into electrical energy. The wood and "duff" from the
forest floor would be burned in this specially designed power plant that is
fueled by biomass, or plant matter. Radionuclides, primarily cesium and
strontium, would be captured in the ash, and could then be disposed of as
low-level or very low-level waste, said Bill Carlson, vice president of
Wheelabrator's western region.
Wheelabrator, which operates five biomass and 16 trash-to-energy plants, is
contributing half _ $800,000 _ of the $1.6 million expense for the two-year
project. The remaining half is being provided by the Department of Energy's
Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention program, which is intended to deter
nuclear proliferation by providing non-weapons-related work to people with
scientific and technical expertise in the former Soviet Union. Sandia and
Belarus will equally share this DOE funding. The project has been formalized in
a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement, approved Sept. 18. The
project's risks and benefits will be examined as it proceeds. The pilot plant
could demonstrate a way to remediate contamination and thus reduce health risks
posed by ingesting the radionuclides, whose weak radioactive emissions are
otherwise easily shielded. A second benefit would be to potentially decrease
Belarus' heavy dependence on imported energy, and consequently lessen the
economic pressure to build additional nuclear power plants. The power generated
by the biomass power stations is projected to cost less than the current or
future average power generation costs in Belarus, providing an economic benefit
to the country.
"The prime consideration is to not make the situation worse," commented David
Brekke, a Sandia health physicist on the project. "If we can't do this in a safe
and environmentally sound manner, it won't go." Already, Baxter said, Belarus
has conducted a feasibility study exploring the use of biomass for electrical
energy there. The country lies south of the Baltic Sea, between Poland and
Russia, and occupies an area about the size of Utah. It imports roughly 90
percent of its energy, lacking any significant reserves of coal or other
traditional fuels for power generation. "Biomass-derived power is ideally
suited to their society," Baxter commented. "We think they will be able to
produce electricity at a rate lower than the current cost in Belarus."
At Sandia, Baxter investigates the burning of a variety of biomass fuels, such
as wood, straw, fruit pits, and nut shells, to generate electricity. He says
"biomass combustion presents one of the largest potentials for expansion of
renewable energy in the United States." Biomass fuels provide about 2 percent of
the energy generated in California, where several companies operate a number of
commercial plants, adds Carlson of Wheelabrator.
Besides citing the potential for Belarus to gain some energy independence by
using biomass, Baxter described the project's humanitarian benefits. Most of the
rural residents of Belarus live very close to the land and depend on the forest
for fuel and supplies. Hence, although it is prohibited, he said some residents
do enter the contaminated forests to gather food, such as mushrooms, and collect
firewood, which can spread contamination through dispersion of airborne fly ash
beyond the forests.
Fallout from the nuclear disaster is showing up in thyroid cancers and leukemia,
particularly in children. Although thousands of people were evacuated after the
accident, the government can't afford to build new cities to house everyone
still living in affected areas (an estimated few million people). In addition,
fertile agricultural land is largely unused because of the contamination.
Overall, a full three-fourths of the country has been contaminated to a
measurable level. One-fourth of that would exceed the U.S. EPA standards for
annual radiation dose by the general population by anywhere from 2 - 100 times,
Baxter said.
Wheelabrator will experiment with burning uncontaminated duff at its commercial
plant in Anderson, Calif., Carlson said, where about 2,000 tons of biomass are
burned per day. By contrast, Carlson said the pilot plant in Belarus may burn
just two tons of material a day. At Sandia's Combustion Research Facility,
Baxter and post-doctoral employees Steve Buckley and Melissa Lunden will model
combustion characteristics, determining through computer simulation which plant
design would minimize the emission of small, hard-to-capture particles. The
model will be benchmarked against Wheelabrator's extensive database for heavy
metals and available radionuclide data.
Left alone, the contaminated regions would take hundreds of years to return to
acceptable levels of radioactivity, Baxter said. Otherwise, if converting
contaminated wood to biomass power is feasible, he predicts the contamination
might be gradually cleared in 30 to 40 years. Sandia is a multiprogram
Department of Energy laboratory, operated by a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin
Corp. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia
has major research and development responsibilities in national defense,
energy, environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.
_____________________________________________________________________
Media contact:
Nancy Garcia
Sandia/California Public Affairs
(510) 294-2932, Nancy_Garcia@Sandia.gov
Technical contacts:
Larry Baxter
Sandia Combustion Research Facility
(510) 294-2862,
baxter@ca.sandia.gov
David Allen, project manager
Wheelabrator Western Region headquarters
Anderson, Calif.
(916) 365-9172
David Brekke
Sandia Environmental Surveillance
(510) 294-2233
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