Payday from Nuclear Waste - Philadelphia Inquirer
By Henry J. Holcomb Inquirer staff writer
The costly cleanup of the vast Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state – a relic of World War II and the Cold War – is turning into a boon for a small, family-owned Camden firm, the Joseph Oat Corp.
It soon will begin making 400 stainless steel canisters strong enough to hold the site’s spent nuclear fuel rods for at least 40 years.
The $21.4 million contract is the largest ever won by the 211-year-old Oat company, said Ron Kaplan, its president/operations.
Additionally, the contract could lead to more and larger jobs as the nation deals with growing stockpiles of nuclear waste, Kaplan said.
Cleanup of the 560-square-mile Hanford site, near Richland, Wash., the nation’s largest stockpile of lethal radioactive nuclear waste, will continue for several decades.
And other military sites and nuclear power plants with the same problem dot the nation’s landscape.
The federally owned Hanford site produced the “Fat Boy” atomic bomb that the United States dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945, and its reactors continued to produce weapons-grade plutonium until 1988.
The nuclear-waste storage tanks there are submerged in cooling water, and the contents of many remain a mystery. Many of the tanks date to World Ware II and were designed to last only a decade. An estimated one million gallons of water contaminated by radioactive leaks from the tanks has seeped into the Columbia River and surrounding water tables, according to government reports.
The canisters to be made by Oat will each be 14 feet long, two feet in diameter, and weigh 3,500 pounds. They are designed to safely hold spent nuclear fuel rods “that never completely burn out – they could melt down and generate extremely high temperatures and any time over the next several thousand years,” said Edward S. Marinock, Oat’s sales vice president.
The canister design has been certified by federal agencies as safe for transporting the rods over public roadways to distant storage areas. The first will be delivered in June, with the rest due over the next 29 months.
“They will be very sophisticated cans,” said Robert G. Slebodnick, an Oat project engineer. “They will be built to the same standards as a nuclear reactor, the highest-quality classification.”
Oat, with 130 employees and $40 million in annual sales, won the contract in nationwide bidding, based on a combination of price and experience in nuclear-related work, Kaplan said. It will be a subcontractor to Fluor Daniel Hanford Inc., the government’s prime cleanup contractor at the site.
Oat’s contract, which will generate about 80,000 hours of skilled shop labor and 20,000 hours of administrative and engineering work over three years, also will benefit other area companies.
For example, the Tura Machine Co., Folcroft, will handle much of the machine shop work on the canisters, Kaplan said.
Oat was founded in Philadelphia in 1788 as a maker of evaporators and stills for the sugar and rum industries.
Martin Kaplan and the late Maurice Holtz bought the company in 1966. Kaplan is still chief executive officer, and the families of the two men still own and run it. In the 1970’s, the firm won a contract to build a petrochemical-acid processing unit that wouldn’t fit in its old shops at 236 Quarry St. in Philadelphia.
So it leased space in an old New York Shipyard building in Camden. A short time later, it moved all its operations to the site, which is now part of the South Jersey Port Corp. Broadway Terminal.
Its facilities include what is believed to be the world’s largest “clean room,” used for metal fabrication.
That 13,000-square-foot room, where much of the nuclear canister fabrication work will be done, has higher-than-usual air pressure to keep contaminants from seeping in. The air inside is finely filtered six times an hour to a cleanliness standard like that at plants where aerospace and computer parts are made.
In recent years, Oat has emerged from a field of 300 fabrication firms worldwide as one of a dozen qualified to work with zirconium, titanium, and other high-grade alloys. Such metals, which are used in petrochemical processing units and nuclear applications, hold up much longer under high heat and also resist corrosion.
Oat has held an “N Stamp” since the late 1960’s, certifying that its equipment and quality-control procedures meet Nuclear Regulatory Commission standards.
The canisters for the Hanford site are designed to last at least 40 years but probably will last 75 additional years, said Marinock, Oat’s sales vice president. “After that,” he said, “it will be up to smart people not yet born, to figure out what to do with the waste.”
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