A standard box of transuranic waste from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, stuck at a commercial site in Texas since 2014, has been approved for shipment to the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
When that waste box is shipped there will be 74 remaining at Waste Control Specialists, Brian McGovern, a spokesman for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, said by email Tuesday.
The Texas commission continues to wait on DOE’s detailed plans for removing remaining drums of potentially ignitable transuranic waste from the Andrews County, Texas disposal site, McGovern said. DOE recently informed the state that the box of waste is no longer considered too hazardous for transport to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M.
It will mark the first shipment from the Texas site to WIPP since July 2019, according to a DOE online database. The shipment from Waste Control Specialists had not been received at WIPP as of Jan. 16, the date of the most recent shipment recorded on the database.
“The Carlsbad Field Office of DOE has approved it for shipment,” McGovern said in an email to Weapons Complex Monitor. The Texas commission has yet to rule upon a permit revision officially approving keeping stranded waste from Los Alamos until Dec. 23, 2022. That is the date approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission under its federal license in December 2020. Because Waste Control Specialists has applied for the permit modification prior to the Dec. 23 expiration of the last one, it is authorized to keep the Los Alamos waste for now, McGovern said recently.
The containers were originally bound for WIPP in early 2014 but were rerouted to Waste Control Specialists after another drum from Los Alamos ignited and leaked radiation into the WIPP underground in February of that year. The accident shut the DOE disposal site for about three years. Some of the waste sent to Waste Control Specialists is similar to the batch that blew at WIPP.
The rerouted Los Alamos containers have been held at the commercial site since then under a series of short-term state and federal regulatory approvals. Within the past 18 months, Texas officials started pushing DOE to remove the problematic waste from the state. William (Ike) White DOE senior adviser for the Office of Environmental Management, told a conference in January 2020 that the agency wanted to move most of the remaining drums out of Texas by the end of 2020.
Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, which short-circuited DOE’s plans. A preliminary disposition plan published by DOE in March 2020 said the transuranic waste at the Andrews County site has grown less combustible over time but remains an ignition risk.
