'Blue light special' helps solve gas cylinder problem

An Integrated Environmental Services employee gets into his "cylinderbuster" suit. The company designed and operates the equipment used to handle gas cylinders at the ETTP site.

"It's like Ghostbusters—we get a call, our guys go to the area in yellow jumpsuits and retrieve the cylinder and take it to be 'recontainerized,'" said Tom Conley, co-manager of a project to process all the mixed-waste compressed-gas cylinders on the Oak Ridge Reservation.

Conley and Mike Morris, both of ORNL's Chemical Technology Division, were given the task of evaluating all the compressed gas cylinders at the Oak Ridge sites, most of which are located at ETTP, and handling the ones found to be radioactively contaminated.

Twenty-one of the cylinders at ETTP already had been designated as having low-level radioactive contamination. Under the ORR Site Treatment Plan issued by the state's Department of Environment and Conservation, these cylinders were to be disposed of by the end of last September, not an easy task given that many of the cylinders couldn't even be transported on public streets.

"The Department of Transportation would never let us ship all of these cylinders," said Conley. "First, they're radioactively contaminated so there is no place available to treat them, and second, in many cases we don't know what's in them. To handle these cylinders, we needed something on site."

That's when Conley received a note from Los Alamos advertising a "blue light special" that fit the bill precisely. The Los Alamos Environmental Management group had begun building a transportable compressed-gas recontainerization skid (TCGRS) that could evaluate and process compressed-gas cylinders. Partway through the project, the group scrapped the idea and offered the machinery at a bargain-basement price.

"This was a $750,000 piece of equipment," said Conley. "We paid $80,000 to have it finished. Now Los Alamos is calling and asking if they can borrow it."

Lending the machine probably won't happen for some time because the pilot project to dispose of the 21 cylinders was so successful that a backlog of some 1,000 cylinders that have not yet officially been declared as surplus are being evaluated and handled through the TCGRS.

Hundreds of cylinders have been brought to the sites throughout the years, and some have more than earned retirement status. Because of age and portability, records on the cylinders are hard to come by, making the contents of some unknown.

"There are thousands of cylinders at the Oak Ridge sites containing almost any gas you can think of," said Morris. "Some of them are dangerous gases, such as fluorine, silane and chlorine trifluoride—you can't just open the valve and vent them."

Once processed by the TCGRS, old cylinders are disposed of as low-level waste, and the cylinder contents are either neutralized, flared, vented or repackaged in clean cylinders for shipment off-site for treatment and disposal. The original project took only five days to complete once the TCGRS was in place. The cylinder found during Conner's inspection was handled that same day.

While the majority of the cylinders currently being used at the sites have proper documentation, Morris and Conley don't see the TCGRS being mothballed.

"There are lots of nooks and crannies at the sites," said Morris. "It was like a cylinder feeding frenzy. Almost every organization on the site came forward identifying problem cylinders. BNFL found some cylinders in the buildings they are working on, and Surveillance and Maintenance identified more than 200 cylinders for evaluation and dispositioning. And there will be more."

A recently drained pond at ETTP revealed a number of contaminated cylinders that Conley and Morris guess had been sunk there over the years from emergency situations.

"Procedures used to dictate that a cylinder could be opened if it was an emergency situation," said Morris. "This meant taking cylinders out to a place called 'the peninsula' and venting them. Today, our facility replaces that operation and it is done in a much more controlled environment, especially when it comes to the hazards of working with a leaking gas cylinder."

While the cost of having a "cylinderbuster" come retrieve a faulty or mysterious cylinder is not cheap, Conley reminds owners of compressed gas cylinders that things could be a lot worse and expensive, too.

"The cost of having someone bring this kind of equipment on site and do the work would be phenomenalnot to mention if we were to contaminate their equipment," Conley explained. "This way, we own the equipment; it's already at the site and we don't have to worry about trying to ship anything out. Bill Simon said this project had hit a home run for the ETTP site; I think it scored big for the whole reservation."—E.B.