Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
9/12/2014
SUMMERLIN, Nev.—Though the shutdown of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant shook the national transuranic waste program, the Department of Energy, state regulators and industry are seeking ways to still make progress toward milestones, officials said here last week. The sole disposal site for transuranic waste, WIPP was shut down by incidents in February and will likely remain closed through at least 2015. However, DOE still remains committed to meeting compliance milestones and mitigating impacts of the WIPP outage. “There are regulatory impacts, there are programmatic impacts, there are technical impacts and there are varying strategies depending on which site, the nature of the inventory, the nature of our contracts and relationships in how we can manage and really make the best of a difficult situation,” DOE Office of Environmental Management Associate Deputy Assistant Secretary for Waste Management Christine Gelles said in a workshop here at the RadWaste Summit. “I’m all about us trying to find ways to maximize progress despite this challenge.”
During the WIPP outage DOE and contractors have continued to address transuranic waste inventories at generator sites, including continued waste processing and seeking solutions for storage of the processed waste. “We’ve worked hard to defend the value of continuing those activities so that we can minimize as much as possible any impacts to our progress milestones and try and hold harmless our end date milestones where we can,” Gelles said. “Of course that’s not entirely possible and there will need to be some renegotiation of certain things and some changes in our strategies.” The Department notably has a pressing commitment in the Idaho Settlement Agreement to remove all transuranic waste from the state by the end of 2018, as well as regulatory milestones for transuranic waste at sites including Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Hanford.
Some TRU Inventories Could be Recharacterized as Mixed LLW
At some sites progress can continue to be made by recharacterizing certain inventories of transuranic waste as mixed low level waste, which could be disposed of at onsite disposal cells, the Nevada National Security Site or commercial disposal sites. DOE does not classify waste until it is processed and packaged into its final form. “There is a possibility of a waste inventory that is conservatively characterized as transuranic that after it is processed, packaged and fully characterized to the WIPP acceptance criteria may ultimately be determined to be low level waste,” Gelles said.
Another possibility to continue making progress involves consolidation, or blending, of waste, a practice DOE has employed in the past. “There is the ability under our policy to take two different waste streams and within certain limits combine them before rendering that final waste package and giving it its official classification,” Gelles said. “This is totally acceptable, and it’s not without precedent.”
Idaho Already Shifting to Mixed Low Level Waste
That strategy is already being employed at Idaho, the site with one of the most pressing regulatory commitments. In the past, some of the mixed low level waste inventory was “blended up” at Idaho’s Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project because previously offsite mixed waste could not be shipped to Nevada or a commercial facility. “Now there’s the opportunity to revisit the flow sheet up there and see if we can’t now focus on generating Mixed Low Level Waste and avoiding the blend up and really focus on driving the waste streams to the lowest possible disposition path that is technically and compliantly achievable,” Gelles said.
In response to the WIPP shutdown, recently AMWTP contractor Idaho Treatment Group and DOE completed a contract modification that incentivizes mixed low-level waste disposition rather than transuranic waste. Much of that waste previously would have been packaged along with transuranic waste for disposal at WIPP. About 338 meters of MLLW has been shipped to Nevada for disposal, and additionally, about 438 cubic meters of waste has been sent offsite for commercial treatment with 171 cubic meters in backlog, ITG President Danny Nichols said at the workshop. “We’ve completely turned around our FY’15 plan in the last six months… we are about 140 percent of plan to date on mixed low level,” he said, noting that the shipping the MLLW is necessary to allow for storage of the transuranic waste that is being processed at Idaho. “Space is at a premium,” he said.
Idaho Pleased With Progress, Questions Remain on Milestone
Given that the 2018 deadline in the settlement agreement is in jeopardy, the state of Idaho appreciates DOE’s progress in continuing moving the waste out of Idaho despite the WIPP outage, Susan Burke of the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality said at the workshop. “Whether it goes out in a drum as mixed low level waste or it goes out as transuranic waste it’s being removed and that risk is being removed,” she said. “Overall what DOE was probably looking at is by still continuing to make a dent in that pile that when we do get WIPP reopened then the amount of transuranic waste that has to be sent there to continue to meet the settlement agreement requirements will be less of a burden to have to do because some of that waste has been able to be recharacterized as mixed low level and shipped out of the state in that manner.”
However, it remains to be seen if the progress on risk reduction by removal of mixed low-level waste will be taken into account by Idaho when it comes to negotiations on the settlement agreement regarding the remaining transuranic waste. When asked about that possibility, Burke said: “The settlement agreement is entered into with the Department of Energy, the governor of the state of Idaho and the attorney general of the state of Idaho. So there are two decisionmakers on the state of Idaho’s part, neither of which is me.” She added, “But yes, there are always provisions to negotiate and so forth within any kind of agreement.”
Once WIPP Reopens, How Will DOE Prioritize Sites?
WIPP could restart limited operations in early 2016, which will likely start off with disposal of the waste that was already sent to WIPP for disposal at the time of the incidents and is already being stored aboveground at the repository. “We are going to be negotiating between now and the time we get into that interim operation if we ship anything from any of the generator sites, and if so what order and how much. The shipping capacity on the initial operation is going to be very low,” DOE Carlsbad Field Office National TRU Program Director J.R. Stroble said at the workshop.
Before the shutdown about half of the waste being sent to WIPP came from Idaho, Stroble noted. “We probably are going to have to help them a little more than we have before,” he said, adding that would be balanced with commitments and milestones at risk at other sites. However, Gelles emphasized that no decisions have been made so far on prioritizing sites. “We’re going to need to continuously assess what our circumstances are at the TRU generator sites, and in my opinion it’s very premature to say who is going to be first in queue or what the allocated commitments are going to be to one site over the other,” she said.
Idaho: States Should Be Involved in Prioritization Conversation
As DOE makes decisions on prioritization, the states should be part of the conversation, Idaho’s Burke said. “The states need to be involved in that in some way. You might be surprised that the answer could be different,” she said. “There might be an opportunity where the states want to talk together and when they actually understand each other’s positions they might have a different take as to what the prioritization schedule should be.” She added that Idaho would like more communication from DOE headquarters. “For headquarters to come out and say ‘I feel your pain’ somewhere along the line, and we understand your issues and are trying to work on it, to me that goes a long way in knowing that there’s some validation of what our situations are,” Burke said.
