SUMMERLIN, NEV — Spurred by audience members and a moderator, a pair of radioactive-waste-disposal professionals critiqued the nearly 40 year-old U.S. low-level radioactive waste compacts here on Wednesday.
“There’s no continuity here between the compacts,” John McCormick, founder and vice president of Bionomics, Inc., Oak Ridge, Tenn., said here at the Exchange Monitor’s annual RadWaste Summit, responding to a question from session moderator Ken Grumski, president of NAC Philotechnics, also of Oak Ridge.
Bionics is a commercial broker of low-level-radioactive-waste and mixed-waste disposal services whose customers are mainly small-volume generators that might only ship once every two years. The company has been working with U.S. low-level waste compacts “for eons,” McCormick said, and “every compact does something different.”
The Low-level Radioactive Waste Policy Amendments Act of 1985 created 10 regional compacts, encompassing two to six states, to manage disposal of low-level radioactive waste within its members’ borders. Nine states and Puerto Rico do not belong to any compact.
There is also an issue, not with the compacts per se, but incidental to doing business in compact states or any other, of license reciprocity.
Similar to other professional licenses, a radioactive materials license granted by the NRC or a business’ home state may not be usable in another state until the licensee complies with that state’s regulations, including paperwork and fees.
That can cause prices for the same services to vary wildly from one state to another, McCormick said, citing swings from fewer than $120 to around $8,000 for packaging low-level radioactive waste for disposa.
If prices get too high, infrequent shippers such as universities or pharmaceutical facilities might decide to hang on to their waste instead of arranging for proper disposal at an outside site.
Another executive at the same session, David Carlson, the president and chief operating officer of the Waste Control Specialists low-level waste disposal site in Andrews, Texas, offered a wishlist of best practices for state compacts.
One improvement “could be to have a standard set of definitions,” Carlson said. “If every compact had the same definition of low-level radioactive waste, that would be a great step forward. They don’t.”
Also, said Carlson, “[i]t’d be good to have a definition of international that was consistent with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It would be good to have a consistent definition of the state of generation that we could all count on and not deal with on a case-by-case basis.”
But when pressed by an audience member to give the compact system a pass-fail grade, neither McCormick nor Carlson would flunk the system.
McCormick said he had “no real issue” with the compact system, which he said helped move radioactive waste disposal past the inefficient throw-and-go system of yore.
“What you saw after the low level waste policy act…all these processors [waste handling companies] crop up and start processing and coming up with ways to further reduce the volume of the waste,” McCormick said. “Before, it was throw everything in a railcar, whatever, and a truck car and go and bury it. There was no volume reduction, there was no innovative ideas. So the compact system has helped reduce the volume of radioactive waste going into the burial sites.”
Carlson, whose Texas-based business operates a state-owned low-level waste disposal facility that’s open to more than 30 states, lauded the compact system for giving Texas a means of creating a disposal site even if the state could not find the means to operate it.
“I don’t view that as a failure,” Carlson said.
Editor’s note, 06/13/2023, 12:51 p.m. Eastern time. The story and its headline were updated to clarify that some of McCormick’s remarks concerned license reciprocity.
