Jeremy L. Dillon
WC Monitor
6/26/2015
The Department of Energy plans to complete by the end of this year the Environmental Impact Statement on the preferred alternative for the disposal of Greater Than Class C waste and GTTC-like waste, DOE-EM’s Director of the Office of Disposal Operations Doug Tonkay said last week at the EPRI Low-Level Waste Conference in Orlando. DOE needs to complete the EIS before it can begin disposing of GTTC waste, but the completion of the report has taken longer than initially expected. ”Currently, there is no disposal option available, but DOE does have the statutory responsibility,” Tonkay said. “We are currently working on our final EIS for disposal of GTCC and DOE GTCC- like waste. We are looking at a number of options from geologic repository to disposal in trenches in engineered vaults. The preferred approach main be a combination of the alternatives. We are considering several DOE sites, as well as generic commercial sites, for the siting of the facility. We are hoping to complete the EIS by the end of the calendar year.”
The DOE Office of Environmental Management has been working for years to identify a disposal site for GTCC-type waste. In 2011, DOE issued a draft environmental impact statement, which estimated the total inventory of GTCC waste at approximately 1,100 cubic meters with an additional 175 cubic meters expected to be generated annually from DOE and commercial activities over the next 60 years. The draft EIS evaluated a number of sites under consideration for GTCC disposal, including Hanford in Washington state; the Idaho National Laboratory; the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico; the Nevada National Security Site; the Savannah River Site; and a “generic” commercial disposal site.
Once the final EIS is completed, DOE must then submit a report to Congress on the alternatives under consideration and wait for final action by lawmakers before moving forward with establishing a disposal site. Tonkay could not provide a timeline for how soon DOE could issue a report to Congress following the completion of the EIS.