Thursday March 25, 2004
Mercury storage at Tooele?
By Donna Kemp
Spangler
Deseret Morning News
The Department of Defense
will decide within the next month where to store the nation's entire stockpile
of mercury. And Tooele, Utah, is still in the running.
In a final environmental impact
statement released recently, the Utah Industrial Depot, formerly part of
the adjacent Tooele Army Depot, is among the five finalists for storing 4,890
tons of mercury that is now in warehouses at three Department of Energy sites
— New Haven, Ind.; Somerville, N.J.; and Warren, Ohio.
The Defense National Stockpile
Center (DNSC), a Defense Department agency charged with storing the materials
for national emergencies such as war, wants to consolidate the mercury at
one location to make it easier to manage.
Besides the three existing sites,
the agency has added two to the list — Utah Industrial Depot and Nevada's
Hawthorne Army Depot. (A site in New York was at one time considered but
later taken off the list after officials there requested it be withdrawn.)
Tooele County residents, who attended
an August public hearing on the federal government's proposal, had mixed feelings
about it.
One the one hand some people weren't
convinced mercury was all that bad.
On its face, pure elemental mercury
has been bought and sold internationally for use in electrical switches, fluorescent
lighting, dental fillings and industrial processing. For more than 50 years,
the government has been safely storing mercury in 128,662 steel flasks inside
30-gallon steel drums for extra protection.
It is when mercury vaporizes into
the environment that could cause a human health risk. And that has prompted
others to be concerned.
"There is no benefit in having
it here," said Jason Groenewold of Families Against Incinerator Risk. "It's
an unnecessary risk that we'll be stuck with indefinitely and frankly, for
the two jobs it would generate, we could do a lot better."
The issue was brought to the forefront
because mercury is no longer bought and sold on the open market. In 1994,
the Environmental Protection Agency raised concerns that too much mercury
already had been released to the global environment.
The DNSC then looked at three
possibilities for long-term handling of the mercury stockpile: keeping it
where it is now stored; moving it all to one central location; selling it.
The final environmental study
has concluded that all three options would have negligible environmental
impacts. However, the federal government prefers to consolidate storage because
"it is the best way to meet its objectives" of simplifying storage.
Costs of storing it over 40 years
at one of the six sites are within 2 percent of each other — about $29 million
at Warren Depot, Ohio to $29.5 million at Utah Industrial Depot, Tooele. For
instance, it would be cheaper to send mercury to a facility that already has
mercury stored there. It would be more expensive to transport all the 128,662
flasks to Tooele.
The cost estimates do not include
security, which is minimal at the Utah Industrial Depot, compared to the
existing Army depots where mercury is already stored.
It has prompted some skepticism
of the report.
"It appears they have gone out
of their way to make Utah look like a much better location by not accounting
for the true costs of storing it here, which has us concerned that they are
trying to pave the way for dumping it here indefinitely," Groenewold said.
Federal regulators say a final
announcement is forthcoming.
"After the final (mercury management
environmental impact statement) has been available for public review for a
minimum of 30 days, a record of decision will be published that explains the
basis for selection of the alternative that will be implemented," the report
stated.
The final environmental impact statement is available online at www.mercuryeis.com.
E-mail: donna@desnews.com