Workmen repair leak in SiCI4 tank
chloride from the damaged tank was being pumped into adjacent tanks; at press time the transfer was just about complete. Bulk Terminals officials say that the tank contained about 780,000 gallons of silicon tetrachloride. They estimate the loss at 100,000 to 250,000 gallons. The exact cause of the leak still hasn't been determined, and the damaged area is now covered with concrete. The present supposition is that the rupture in the tank was caused by defective welding around an outlet valve. The silicon tetrachloride belonged to Cabot Corp. According to a Cabot representative at the accident site, the chemical is used to make colloidal silica products at the company's Tuscola, 111., plant. Official reactions to the spill have varied. A spokesman for the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency says that that office has been preoccupied with the health and control aspects of the accident and that no decisions have yet been made concerning legal action. However, Chicago's Department of Environmental Control has been issuing daily citations for "illegal releasing of atmospheric pollutants." The Illinois attorney general has called for a grand jury investigation of the accident, and the Illinois legislature says it will look into the adequacy of existing laws governing the storage of dangerous chemicals.
Recycling refuse grows more profitable There may be no gold in garbage, but it is becoming increasingly profitable to recycle refuse. One of the strong messages from the first National Materials Conservation Symposium, held at the National Bureau of Standards, near Washington, D.C., last week, was that profit motivation has begun to displace environmental altruism in the matter of better waste disposal and reclamation of usable resources. One of the keynote speakers, Elliott M. Estes, executive vice president of General Motors, cited
the remark of a waste processor: "We are up to our knees in garbage and couldn't be -happier about it." At every turn, however, it was recognized at the meeting that one reason for the increased profitability is the effect of increasingly stringent disposal requirements imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency and other regulatory bodies. Concern over increasing national reliance on imports of minerals became a subsidiary theme at the symposium. Many attending the conference were quite vocal in their desire to avoid a situation similar to the foreign oil embargo, with the consequent upsetting of market stability. One reason why U.S. mineral import deficits have reached about $8 billion annually is that U.S. technology is geared to high-grade mineral recovery. This approach is becoming strategically unacceptable and provides a strong incentive to use low-grade mineral deposits, which the U.S. has in abundance. One encouraging note sounded at the symposium is that the U.S. is well off in mineral resources compared to most other nations. The symposium, jointly sponsored by NBS, Bureau of Mines, EPA, National Center for Resource Recovery, and American Society for Testing and Materials, is the first of a series aimed at better organizing the re-use of minerals in wastes. After day-long deliberations, five working groups presented recommendations for future action toward improving such re-use. Although most industries were viewed as having a good internal recycle program, the same couldn't be said of municipal wastes, the mineral portions of which were considered by the symposium. The biggest problems associated with re-use of municipal wastes are collection inefficiencies and the highly variable composition of the wastes.
More safeguards urged against nuclear theft Will threats by terrorist groups to use nuclear weapons to back up their demands replace kidnapping and other activities? According to an Atomic Energy Commission study team, such an event may be altogether possible. For it finds that present AEC regulations are "entirely inadequate" to meet the threat of illegal acquisi-
tion of special nuclear materials such as highly enriched uranium and plutonium. Further, this threat recently has been enhanced by the dissemination of precise and accurate information on how to make a nuclear weapon in your basement, by the continuing movement— sometimes forced, prompting strong resentment—of personnel into and out of weapons design and manufacture, and by the increasingly sophisticated operations of terrorist groups. These are among the conclusions reached by the AEC-commissioned study prepared by a team of four outside consultants and one AEC official to "say what ought to be done about safeguards" for special nuclear material. What they say has been presented in very candid terms. In essence, the study team calls for an "immediate and far-reaching change" in the existing safeguards program. The team notes, "It is our strong feeling that the point of view adopted, the amount of effort expended, and the level of safety achieved in keeping special nuclear material out of the hands of unauthorized people is entirely out of proportion to the danger to the public involved." The team calls for AEC to "adopt the same framework for safeguards protection as is normally used in examining the safety of power plants." Specific recommendations by the study team for minimizing the possibility that special nuclear material will fall into malevolent hands include: • Establishment of a federal nuclear protection and transportation service. "Private companies have neither the capability nor the desire to meet the sort of threats" that might be posed by those seeking to divert the nuclear material. • Changes in in-plant inventory methods, including, among other things, the adoption of an upgraded measuring of special nuclear materials out of and into process or storage steps. "The uncertainties in the accumulated material balance of the atomic energy operation of the country already make it impossible to say that an explosive mass has not been diverted." AEC says it already has taken steps to "significantly strengthen the existing safeguards," and that it is "taking a hard look" at the study team's report to determine what additional safeguards should be taken. However, AEC points out, the fuel used so far is low-enriched uranium "which cannot be made into a bomb." May 6, 1974 C&EN
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