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.
WIPP 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 canisters once they are filled with processed waste. The board did not specify how many canisters, but members say the goal 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.
“Disposing of the retired DWPF melters and canisters as other than HLW based on actual risks could result in an enormous reduction in HLW repository disposal costs, and a large increase in the certainty that the future disposition of these wastes could be achieved safely and protective of human health, worker safety and the environment,” according to the CAB recommendation.
The recommendation does not include fact-finding data to support that mission, but the board wants DOE to jump-start that effort to see if the request is feasible. The Energy Department will decide whether to approve the recommendation. There is no timeline for a decision.
Corbett said the recommendation was too vague for her and that she wasn’t comfortable with the thought of reclassifying waste: “I would want to see a radiological analysis of the melters to see what it is contaminated with, what is the half-life of the isotopes. … I guess that’s what an analysis by the DOE would do, but I have a lot of questions about this.”
