The extended closure of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico threatens the Energy’s Department legal obligation to remove all transuranic waste from Idaho by the end of 2018, the DOE Inspector General’s Office said in a report released on Sept. 15.
Department officials have acknowledged the possible risk cited in the IG’s audit of interim storage of transuranic waste in the wake of the February 2014 vehicle fire and underground radiation release that shuttered WIPP for nearly three years.
Generally, DOE facilities that hold significant amounts of transuranic waste “were able to meet their individual interim TRU waste storage needs” while they waited for WIPP to reopen to waste shipments last April, the IG’s Office said.
“Also, although the Department did not satisfy all of its regulatory commitments related to TRU waste stored at large quantity sites, nothing came to our attention that would indicate that regulatory commitments impacted large quantity sites’ plans to store TRU waste on-site until WIPP resumed operations,” the report says.
Along with waste produced through its own nuclear operations over a period of decades, the Idaho Site has been host to defense-related TRU waste from other sites in the EM complex, such as the old Rocky Flats facility in Colorado. WIPP is the nation’s only underground storage site for defense-related TRU waste.
Under a 1995 settlement agreement with Idaho, DOE committed to taking all of its transuranic waste out of the state by Dec. 31, 2018. It had shipped about 55,000 of the 65,000 cubic meters of material on-site by early 2014.
The Idaho-DOE agreement also mandates that a “running average” of at least 2,000 cubic meters of transuranic waste be removed from the state each year from 2014 to 2016.
“While these commitments were not met to date, there was not a defined impact to the Department,” according to the report.
Idaho has been by far the top waste shipper to the reopened WIPP. Among 53 shipments received through early September, 33 came from the Idaho National Lab.
By last week the total count of shipments had increased to 60, encompassing about 450 waste containers. Another 25,000 containers are awaiting transport to WIPP from DOE sites around the nation.
Most large-volume sites coped with the WIPP outage by storing all or some of their TRU waste on-site. Here is a rundown of the TRU waste implications at other key sites:
- The Hanford Site in Washington state renegotiated a federal facility agreement and consent order timeline to avoid breaching any regulatory obligations.
- At the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the DOE IG did not find any major waste-related regulatory issues.
- The Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee initially faced a lack of interim storage space at its Transuranic Waste Processing Center. To deal with this, DOE acquired some new storage casks to enable the agency to relocate some waste from the center to separate storage at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Also, some TRU waste has been recharacterized as low-level and mixed low-level waste and disposed of off-site.
- The plan of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico was to move some transuranic waste off-site while keeping the rest on-site. Relocating select legacy waste helped Los Alamos reduce the risk posed by potential wildfires near above-ground storage at Area G. In keeping with an agreement with the state of New Mexico, 39 shipments were sent to Waste Control Specialists’ storage complex in West Texas. But further shipments were held up due to safety concerns. The DOE IG found that Los Alamos faces “significant on-site storage challenges” for non-legacy waste generated since October 1998.
The five DOE sites hold an estimated 97 percent of the department’s transuranic waste. Idaho, Savannah River, and Oak Ridge have all made shipments to WIPP since April, while Los Alamos and Hanford are still waiting their turn.
Idaho has been home to various government-backed research reactors over the years.
