The transuranic waste sitting at the Separations Process Research Unit in Schenectady County. N.Y. could head to the Idaho National Laboratory starting in fiscal 2024 to be prepped for final shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, according to the Department of Energy’s fiscal year 2022 budget request.
Processing of the Separations Process Research Unit (SPRU) transuranic (TRU) waste at Idaho will then take place between fiscal years 2024 and 2025, according to the Joe Biden administration’s justification for the nearly $7.6 billion request for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management.
DOE had expected to start moving the TRU waste, now held outdoors in Conex boxes at the New York site, to Idaho in 2020 and 2021. The DOE did not respond by press time Thursday to a query about why the process is taking longer than once expected.
While DOE transferred ownership of the SPRU property back to the Office of Naval Reactors in December, some cleanup work remains at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory property and SPRU is again budgeted for $15 million in the fiscal year starting Oct. 1, just as it was for fiscal 2021.
Treatment, processing, certification and shipment of up to half of the transuranic waste at SPRU is planned to be part of a nationwide indefinite delivery-indefinite quantity basic ordering agreement task order for waste treatment with DOE. That order should be in place by the end of fiscal year 2021, according to the budget justification.
Remaining chores include moving the TRU off-site, and removal of equipment from an area next to the former H2 Building, DOE has said. The TRU waste is from building sumps and old SPRU processing equipment.
There are two-dozen containers of TRU waste, or possible TRU waste, stored onsite at SPRU under a permit by the New York Department of Environmental Conservation. Some of the material, if found not to be transuranic, could be headed to a low-level radioactive waste site, according to budget material.
The roughly 15-acre SPRU site is located within the larger 170-acre Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in Niskayuna, N.Y. SPRU housed a pilot plant used in the 1950s to research and develop the means of separating plutonium and uranium from irradiated uranium.
