Ten years ago, the world's worst nuclear accident spewed out an estimated 200 times the radiation unleashed by the atomic bombs that were dropped on both Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Today, a collaboration of private business and researchers from the United States and Belarus is planning to test a way to decontaminate the forests north of Chernobyl. The project will evaluate health, environmental, and economic consequences of a pilot biomass power plant designed to burn contaminated timber for energy and at the same time capture the radioactivity in the ash.

Larry Baxter, a chemical engineer at Sandia National Laboratories, and researchers at the Belarus 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, NH, 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 power plant that is specially designed to be 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 5 biomass and 16 trash-to-energy plants, is contributing half - $800,000 of the $1.6M expense for the two-year project. The remaining half is divided equally between Sandia and Belarus. That money is being provided by the DoE'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.

Belarus, a recently independent state, is located south of the Baltic Sea, between Poland and Russia. It occupies an area about the size of Utah. Situated just north of Chernobyl, Belarus received about 70 percent of the radioactive fallout released during the nuclear reactor explosion and subsequent fires. Approximately 25 percent of its total area, mainly the heavily forested southeast portions of the country, has contamination that would exceed the U.S. EPA standards for annual radiation dose by anywhere from 2 to 100 times.

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. Compounding the problem, rural residents of Belarus live very close to the land and had, in the past, depended on the forest for fuel and supplies. Hence, although it is prohibited, some residents do enter the forests to gather food, such as mushrooms, and collect firewood, which can spread contamination through dispersion of airborne flying ash beyond the forests.

"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." "Left alone," Sandia's Larry Baxter said, "the contaminated regions would take hundreds of years to return to acceptable levels of radioactivity". Otherwise, if converting contaminated wood to biomass power is feasible, he predicts the contamination might be gradually cleared in 30 to 40 years.

Belarus, a country that lacks any significant reserves of coal or other traditional fuels for power generation, imports roughly 90 percent of its energy. Using the contaminated biomass to create electrical energy would be an added economic benefit by decreasing its heavy dependence on imported energy and consequently lessening the economic pressure to build additional nuclear power plants. The projected cost of biomass energy is less than the current or future average power generation costs.

Baxter said, "Belarus has already conducted a feasibility study exploring the use of biomass for electrical energy there." 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.

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.

For more information contact FLC representative:

C.V. Subramanian
(510) 294-2311; Fax: (510) 294-3389
e-mail: cvsubra@sandia.gov

Excerpted from Press Release, Sandia Public Affairs Office