GTS Duratek's glass process provides break Patent gains attention for ridding plutonium

It sounds like a bad thing: vitrification.

Like a word a movie critic might use to trash, say, "The Mirror Has Two Faces." Or something that happens to a dead body after a week in the woods.

What the word really means is "to make into glass." And what it means to the Columbia company GTS Duratek is a promising future.

Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary last month picked vitrification as one of three processes the government would explore in a historic effort to dispose of about half the national stockpile of plutonium, the stuff of nuclear bombs.

O'Leary didn't mention the company by name, but GTS Duratek is the only outfit in the country using vitrification to neutralize hazardous and low-level radioactive waste on a commercial scale.

It will be several years -- at least two for initial studies -- before the government really gets cranking on the great plutonium toss-out. But O'Leary's pick was a significant endorsement in a burgeoning and competitive new field.

"The good news for Duratek is that DOE looked at numerous alternatives and of all the alternatives they chose vitrification as the best. And clearly Duratek is the pioneering force in vitrification," said Jeffrey C. Robins, an analyst for Gruntal & Co. in New York.

52 tons of plutonium

The Energy Department says it considered almost 50 processes for getting rid of about 52 tons of plutonium, which is a by-product of nuclear reactions and is used solely for creating weapons.

O'Leary wound up endorsing two basic techniques to explore: immobilizing the plutonium and using it as nuclear reactor fuel. She discarded the idea of simply burying the material.

Vitrification is considered an immobilization technique, which means the hazardous material is encased in a substance -- glass -- that makes it almost unreachable.

O'Leary also plans to have the department look into immobilizing the plutonium in ceramics, which is similar to vitrification.

Burning the element as a mixed oxide -- or MOx -- fuel in nuclear reactors is a more controversial type of disposal.

The technique is well-proven and effective, but many groups fear the prospect of putting plutonium into wider use by distributing it to energy plants. And the plants themselves are already in disfavor in the United States, posing even more political and regulatory hurdles on the local level.

Vitrification carries no such conceptual weight.

The idea of turning hazardous waste into glass has been studied since the 1960s, though the process goes back much further.

Yellow Depression glass, that carnival-looking stuff you find in antiques shops and grandmothers' curios, was made in the 1930s by mixing uranium with molten glass. The uranium made the glass yellow.

Bright orange Fiestaware plates are made by dissolving thorium in a glass glaze and applying it to porcelain.

Molten glass, it turns out, will dissolve about 90 percent of the periodic table, said GTS Duratek engineering and technology director Bradley W. Bowan II.

"It's like putting sugar or salt in water. It disperses the material on an atomic level into the glass," Bowan said. "And when it cools, the glass is a very durable solid. It doesn't break down or degrade."

At least, as far as anyone knows. Bowman said archaeology teaches that glass should have the millennial staying power you need for nuclear disposal -- the dissolved materials will still be radioactive, after all, and must be stored for thousands of years.

Phoenician artifacts and even geologic formations of glass show that the substance can stand the test of time, Bowman said.

Putting plutonium in glass poses a special challenge, though, compared with the ordinary nuclear waste that GTS Duratek has been converting. Weapons-grade plutonium doesn't emit as many harmful rays as nuclear waste, but it has a nasty tendency to start chain reactions and go critical -- as in, ka-BLAM -- if too much of it is concentrated together.

2 years of research

Government scientists will be researching those and other problems over the next two years or so before the Energy Department settles on how to go.

And, equally as importantly, America has to make sure Russia is on board with similar plans to get rid of its plutonium stockpile. "This involves a lot of political issues, so we're still a long way away," analyst Robins said.

In the meantime, GTS Duratek hopes for a boost from the energy secretary's endorsement as it seeks more business. The government is just beginning to privatize the cleanup of nuclear waste sites all over the country.

GTS Duratek helped arm itself for future ventures by issuing a secondary public offering last April, raising $43 million after expenses.

The company logged about $40.4 million in revenues in 1995 and expects that figure to rise, plateau and rise again as it brings new projects on line.

The company earlier last year fired up what it bills as the world's largest radioactive waste melter at the Department of Energy's Savannah River Site in South Carolina, where it vitrifies low-level radioactive waste. And on Dec. 20, GTS Duratek and a team led by BNFL Inc. of Great Britain won a $1 billion contract to clean up a nuclear waste site in Idaho.

And it is partnered with BNFL on a contract worth up to $4 billion to clean up one of the largest nuclear waste sites in the country at Hanford, Wash.

Pub Date: 1/05/97