b'C H A P T E R 20A Q U E S T I O N O F M I SS I O NGovernor Samuelsons Task Force Management and Transportation and TRU waste be segregated from otherwrapped up its own work a few months announced that it had chosen a salt kinds of nuclear waste and also belater. It, too, found no evidence of any mine in Lyons, Kansas, for an evalua- stored so that it could be retrieved at apresent hazard. Nor was any hazard tion as an underground repository for later date. 3 6likely in the future. The AEC had writ- Rocky Flats and other radioactiveten the Task Force to say that the AEC waste. The AEC expected to start ship- Wehmann looked at various problems.would start removing the TRU waste in ping wastes to Kansas around 1975. Part of the Burial Ground area had lavathe Burial Ground before the end of the Undoubtedly, this expectation underlay rock fairly close to the surface, makingdecade, reiterating a statement that AEC intentions to begin removing it unsuitable for pit and trench burial.Glenn Seaborg had made earlier to buried waste from Idaho. Further, AEC He concluded that if this area were cov-Senator Frank Church. With that kind Headquarters began the long-deferred ered with asphalt paving, it could beof schedule, the problem obviously task of developing a set of policies, used for above-ground storage, and thiswould disappear. The Task Force also standards, and criteria that would apply plan eventually went into effect as athought it was time the Idaho gover- uniformly to waste management prac- way of making economical use ofnors office establish a formal liaison tices at all of its laboratories. 35 Burial Ground space. 37with the NRTS and hire qualifiedexperts to maintain a continuing check In response to the new attention being On the recommendation of John Horan,on NRTS waste management. 34 focused on waste, Ginkels staff began the IDO had told Rocky Flats in the fallconsidering the implications for its own of 1969 that it could no longer expectAEC Headquarters also had been waste management practices. We want to deliver waste for burial during thereceiving public complaints from sever- some new thinking on the Burial winter and spring months (due to floodal other parts of the country regarding Ground, was the message to George hazards and the reassessment of prac-the waste management practices at Wehmann, director of IDOS Office of tices then underway). After the AECssome of its other facilities. It created a Waste Management. Furthermore, the March 1970 directive, there would benew division called the Office of Waste AEC in March of 1970 directed that no more subsurface Rocky Flats burialsat all. The Rocky Flats barrels andboxes went to asphalt pads built adja-cent to the old Burial Ground, wherethe barrels were stacked on their sidesto prevent water from pooling on thetops. 38One day, someone noticed water leak-ing from a few of the barrels. Wehmannrecalled: This was happening despite the asser -tions of Rocky Flats that they weresending only solids in these barels. Irwent to Rocky Flats and we had a don -A 1970 view of the Burial Ground shows theTransuranic Storage Area in the foreground, a newdestination for Rocky Flats transuranic waste.INEEL 70-52122 0 1'