An advisory board that monitors environmental management issues at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina wants the Department of Energy to reclassify old liquid waste equipment so it can be shipped off-site for permanent disposal.
The SRS Citizens Advisory Board (CAB) voted 22-1 Tuesday to request that DOE investigate whether used liquid waste melters and certain waste canisters can be reclassified as a different waste form, making them eligible for storage at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M.
Board votes are conducted anonymously using an electronic system, so it was not immediately known who cast the single “no” vote. However, CAB member Susan Corbett expressed reservations about the proposal during the first day of the meeting on Monday.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant is used for permanent underground disposal of DOE transuranic (TRU) waste, material contaminated with radioactive elements during activities such as processing of spent reactor fuel or nuclear weapons production. The SRS melters are designated as high-level waste (HLW), due to their use in processing high-level liquid waste stored at Savannah River.
The melters, which weigh anywhere from 65 to 75 tons, are vessels used at the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) to convert high-level waste into a less harmful form. All told, SRS houses roughly 35 million gallons of radioactive high-level waste, a byproduct of Cold War nuclear weapons operations, in more than 40 aging underground tanks. The melters mix the waste with a material that removes contamination, and then pours the mixture into canisters for interim storage on site.
The Defense Waste Processing Facility has already retired two melters, which are stored at the plant’s Failed Equipment Storage Vault. The third melter went online on Dec. 29.
The CAB recommendation would also cover some of the filled waste canisters. The board did not specify how many canisters, but members say the goal of the recommendation is to rid the site of as much waste as possible.
The melters and canisters would be reclassified as transuranic waste so they could be shipped to WIPP.
