Chemicals on campus
By Jefferson Dodge
Unbeknownst to many, the University of Colorado at Boulder is harboring hazardous and radioactive materials on campus.

But before you start picturing glowing ooze on the loose, you should probably know that this involves a fortified bunker with walls that are 24 inches thick in some places.

CU was actually ahead of the times in 1995 when it built a facility on the east end of campus for temporarily storing hazardous materials.

Colorado State University and CU’s Anschutz Medical Campus in Denver have recently built similar facilities.

Ralph Bogle, a chemical treatment specialist, says CU’s treatment storage and disposal (TSD) facility was built to military specifications, like an airplane hangar. “You could hit this thing with a 500-pound bomb,” he says proudly.

The 4,000-square-foot room is filled with sealed 55-gallon drums that are grouped according to the type of material they hold. Each section of the floor on which they sit is circled by grated trenches that would capture any spill, keeping it from spreading to other areas, and possibly reacting with other chemicals.

There is a dedicated “oxidizer room,” circled by similar trenches, that separates oxidizers from the flammables, since mixing the two with a spark could create a fire that would not stop burning for a long time, according to Hazardous Materials Program Manager Mark Lapham.

The building was constructed with its utility lines in the ceiling, and the concrete floor is sealed with epoxy, both of which would prevent the spread of a leak or reaction.

Lapham says that having a permit for a TSD allows CU to store materials for up to one year instead of only 90 days. This saves the university thousands of dollars, because it allows workers to gradually fill up the large drums and store them over a longer period of time, only scheduling special removal trucks to pick up shipments about three times a year. He estimates that CU spends $60,000 to $70,000 a year on removal, whereas that amount is at least twice as much at peer universities.

Much of the hazardous material comes from experiments conducted in CU science departments, in fields like chemistry, physics and biology.

“The cure for cancer takes a lot of experimentation, and there are leftovers,” Bogle says.

There are also a lot of photography chemicals that need to be disposed of properly, and that is Bogle’s department. One might think that fixer and stopper chemicals would no longer be needed in the age of Adobe Photoshop, and Bogle says that while he has seen a decrease in the volume, there are still art and photo departments that use the old-fashioned way of developing film and prints.

In a separate room, Bogle’s job is to extract the silver out of the chemicals so that it doesn’t end up contaminating groundwater. He uses a squat machine that he fondly refers to as “R2-D2” to conduct a chemical process that essentially exchanges ions of silver for ions of iron, so that the silver can be reused for other purposes, like electronics.

Radioactive materials are kept in still another room, where they are categorized according to half-life and allowed to decay in sealed drums. Michelle Law, the radiation safety officer, says radioactive materials with short and medium half-lives can sit in the drums until they are decayed, and then they can be sent to the landfill, whereas material with a long half-life is shipped away for burial, primarily to a site near Hanford, Wash.

Law and the other handlers agree that while the public envisions green globs when terms like “hazardous waste” are used, such materials are common, and they are found in everything from aerosols to smoke detectors to rocks around the Flatirons.

“It’s even in your old, brightorange Fiestaware,” Law says. “It’s safe to eat on, just don’t chip away at it. It has uranium in it.”

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