The Department of Energy’s Carlsbad Field Office in New Mexico is not planning to add any treatment capabilities for problem shipments of transuranic waste arriving at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a federal manager said Tuesday.
“We don’t have any measures in our permit, we are not a treatment facility,” said Ken Princen, assistant manager of DOE’s Carlsbad-based national transuranic waste disposal program. “We have a very limited capability or allowance for cleanup of any type of contamination” on containers arriving at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), he added.
Princen, who spoke during a public forum on WIPP issues, said he did not know of any push to change that situation.
Princen was responding to a question from Don Hancock, director of the nuclear waste safety program for the Albuquerque-based Southwest Research and Information Center, about a contaminated waste box sent back to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina during August.
During a meeting last week of the Savannah River Site Citizens Advisory Board, a manager with that site’s operations contractor said the container had to be returned to South Carolina because WIPP is not set up to manage contamination.
“And, so, I’m wondering if indeed that’s something that CBFO is considering as well,” Hancock said, of adding waste treatment at WIPP. Hancock said he was glad to hear there is apparently no such plan.
The DOE’s waste characterization program for defense-related transuranic waste seeks to head off any contaminated or potentially combustible containers before they head to WIPP.
“We did get communication from Savannah River today that the package has been unloaded and they are getting ready to go into the investigation” of the contaminated HalfPACT, Princen said. The container returned to Savannah river holds contaminated drums, now wrapped in plastic, which were initially used to ship waste from DOE’s Mound Site in Ohio, agency officials have said.
