The Department of Energy has issued Waste Control Specialists (WCS) a “request for task proposal” for long-term storage and management of elemental mercury.
In a Jan. 17 notice, DOE’s Environmental Management Consolidated Business Center said the Dallas-based operator of a waste disposal complex in West Texas is the only vendor capable of providing the required, highly specialized services. Waste Control Specialists was asked to submit a written proposal to the Energy Department by this past Wednesday, the notice says.
The Energy Department still has the option of soliciting bids from multiple contractors if it cannot reach an agreement with WCS. No formal selection will be made until after the Energy Department issues a record of decision spelling out its plan for mercury storage.
The Energy Department plans to issue a firm-fixed-price task order for a vendor to operate a facility for long-term storage of roughly 1,200 metric tons of mercury, most of it apparently coming from the Y-12 National Security Complex at Oak Ridge, Tenn. At Y-12 large amounts of mercury were used for lithium separation in the 1950s and ‘60s during development of nuclear bombs.
The Mercury Export Ban Act of 2008 sought to reduce the availability of elemental or metallic mercury in U.S. and international markets. This hazardous material has to be sent somewhere and the same act also requires DOE to set up a long-term domestic storage site.
Waste Control Specialists President and Chief Operating Officer David Carlson said his company is responding the DOE notice, but declined to discuss details. “We are trying to support the DOE as best we can, and if something comes about, it comes about,” he said by telephone Thursday.
Waste Control Specialists owns a private commercial facility covering more than 1,300 acres licensed for disposal of various chemical and radioactive wastes. It also owns about 13,000 acres next to its existing waste site on the Texas-New Mexico line. The company is the preferred option in DOE’s 2011 final environmental impact statement for mercury storage.
It was one of 10 potential mercury disposal site locations submitted during a 2009 federal procurement. The others were the DOE Grand Junction disposal site in Colorado; the DOE Hanford Site in Washington state; the Hawthorne Army Depot in Nevada; the Idaho National Laboratory; DOE’s Kansas City National Security Complex in Missouri; Lowland Environmental Services in Tennessee; Meritex Enterprises in Kansas; DOE’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina; and a Veolia North America site in Colorado.
The final EIS noted the export ban would result in large inventories of mercury, with the biggest existing chunk being 1,200 metric tons at Y-12. Between now and 2052, more mercury will need to be addressed from gold mining, waste reclamation and recycling, and four chlor-alkali plants used to make a chlorine solution. While it appears the DOE solicitation would address the first 1,200 metric tons, it is unclear if WCS is being asked to provided a home for mercury from the non-DOE sites.
The enclosed mercury storage site would be considered a DOE facility and used for inspection, handling, and storing mercury. The facility is required to have space for storage of mercury containers, obtain needed permits, and be prepared to respond to “any plausible mercury vapor or liquid release,” according to the Energy Department.
The Energy Department will not schedule any mercury shipments until the facility has met all the legal and regulatory requirements, including obtaining a Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) permit.
The online procurement document says if no facility is operating by Jan. 1, 2020, then the Energy Department must take title to all elemental mercury accumulated at generator sites from the processing of ore. The agency would also pay for storage costs at the generator sites if the national facility is not ready by that year.
Congress initially hoped to have the national facility operating by 2013, but the deadline was pushed back to 2019. An Energy Department interim guidance document from 2013 stipulated no part of the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee, which includes Y-12, would be considered for long-term storage.
For information, contact DOE’s Carin’s Boyd at [email protected].
Waste Control Specialists continues to provide short-term storage for drums of problem transuranic waste from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Several hundred drums were sent to WCS in 2014 after an underground radiation release closed DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant; 113 of those were found to contain “inappropriately remediated nitrate salts” akin to the LANL drum linked to the episode at WIPP. In September 2017, DOE issued WCS a $19.3 million task order, which could last for three years with extensions.
In December, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved leaving the problem Los Alamos waste at WCS until late December 2020. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality is in its final stages of review to extend the state permit to 2020 as well, said TCEQ spokesman Brian McGovern.
In addition, WCS is one of three sites now under consideration for disposal of material generated from conversion of depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio and the Paducah Site in Kentucky.
