The term "Vyleater" sounds like a reference to a carnivorous prehistoric menace straight out of Jurassic Park.
In reality, it's the brand name of a sophisticated piece of equipment that not only is saving Emory a significant amount of money on disposal fees for radioactive waste generated on campus, but also is allowing Emory to recycle much of the radioactive waste materials it produces.
The Vyleater is one piece of equipment located in Emory's new storage and processing facility for radioactive and hazardous chemical waste. The 4,000-square-foot area in the basement of the Woodruff Memorial Building's (WMB) West Wing addition began operating last month, processing a large portion of the 130,000 pounds of radioactive and chemical waste that Emory produces annually primarily through scientific research activities. Frank Lisella, director of Emory's Environmental Health and Safety Office, oversees both the WMB facility and a similar one in Rollins Center. Departments that generate radioactive and hazardous chemical wastes bring those substances to the WMB and Rollins facilities every Thursday for processing and storage. When large enough quantities are accumulated, external waste disposal firms come and pick up the material either for recycling or for disposal at a hazardous waste facility.
"What we have now is a storage and processing facility that is of the same caliber as the research facility that it supports," Lisella said, who believes that Emory's hazardous waste facilities are far more sophisticated than any in the Atlanta area. "We are really hitting the power curve now with this kind of technology. This is, in effect, what Emory is going to have for the future. These facilities are going to be around for a long time."
The new facility features:
*The Vyl-eater, which crushes scintillation vials (which are similar to test tubes) that contain "wet" radioactive waste. "The Vyl-eater allows us to reduce the total volume of weight by crushing the vials down to the point where they're just like glass," Lisella explained. "The glass shards are cleaned and disposed of in solid waste. The Vyleater extracts the solvent, which is reused in either in an industrial kiln or an industrial boiler."
The crushing action of the Vyleater reduces the bulk of the waste six times.
*A compactor for dry radioactive waste. This device allows a volume of waste that originally occupied four 55-gallon drums to be compacted into one 85-gallon drum, thereby saving the University thousands of dollar per year in disposal costs.
*A larger storage and processing area for hazardous chemical wastes, most of which are flammable liquids. "Because the majority of the liquid waste that we generate here has a very high BTU value, the material can be sent to a fuels blending facility," said Lisella. "They take things like old paint waste, mineral spirits and similar substances, add our material to it, and use it as fuel for industrial boilers, power plants, etc."
"One of the primary advantages of this new facility is that we can store more material than we ever could in the past," Lisella said. "That makes it more economically feasible to have the material shipped out to the fuels blending facility."
Storing flammable liquids is no simple task. The new WMB facility has a number of safety features unique to the demands of storing flammable liquids. The ventilation system provides for single-pass air, which means air enters the storage area at one point and passes directly out of the building. This keeps the air, which could potentially pick up chemical vapors somewhere along the line, from being recirculated to other parts of the building. Several of the storage areas have floor sweepers, vents just a short distance off the floor, which prevent the air from recirculating. In addition, a sunken floor ensures that any chemical spill would be contained to the immediate area.
The area is also equipped with pressure-relief panels in the walls. In the unlikely event of an explosion, the panels would send the force of the explosion outward rather than upward, thereby protecting occupants of the upper portions of the building from harm. Another "curtain" wall was built just outside the pressure-relief walls to stop pieces of the wall from becoming dangerous projectiles in an explosion, averting the possibility of bystanders being injured or nearby buildings being damaged.
--Dan Treadaway