The Beaver Valley Power Station in Shippingport could run out of space for its low-level radioactive waste in two to five years.
A local university and hospital have changed their practices so they don't have to keep radioactive isotopes on their campuses.
The problem is that Pennsylvania, like 35 other states, no longer has a place to get rid of its low-level radioactive waste. That means anyone generating the material has to store it, at least temporarily, until a permanent site becomes available.
And that could take years.
"What are we going to do with it, send it to the sun?" said Gregory Rogers, director of the Intelligence and National Security Program at Point Park University. "We should be looking at it not as a panic right now but as what should we be doing in 2015?"
Until July, Pennsylvania producers could send radioactive waste to a disposal site in Barnwell, S.C. But the site has been closed to garbage from anywhere except South Carolina, New Jersey and Connecticut. Another facility in Washington serves 11 Western states.
Pennsylvania does not have a disposal site or plans to build one, said Rich Janati, the state's top nuclear regulator. Officials abandoned an effort to build one here a decade ago because it would have cost too much -- $120 million to $150 million -- and because generators could send the waste out of state.
Yet, with no other option, facilities in Pennsylvania and neighboring West Virginia, Maryland and Delaware -- which make up the federally sanctioned Appalachian States Low-Level Radioactive Waste Compact -- could start to run out of storage space by 2013, Janati said.
With the waste scattered at sites across the United States rather than in one central depository, some critics fear it is more vulnerable to terrorism and could be used to build a "dirty" bomb, an explosive device that spreads radioactive material. Security experts and regulators said that's not likely because even small amounts of radioactive material are highly controlled and tracked.
Still, they said, Pennsylvania, like the rest of the country, needs to find a permanent solution. The problem requires a national response, said Janati, administrator of the Appalachian compact.
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