The Energy Department could develop a new mobile treatment unit to clean up more than 70 barrels of potentially explosive nuclear waste stored at a private contractor in Texas, a source in New Mexico said Tuesday.
The 70 barrels, which contain a combination of plutonium-contaminated nitrate salts and organic kitty litter, represent the greater part of the 100-plus barrels from the Los Alamos National Laboratory that privately owned Waste Control Specialists has stored under contract since 2014 at its waste complex near Andrews, Texas.
DOE calls this type of transuranic waste, produced during Cold War weapons programs, “inappropriately remediated nitrate salts.” This is the same kind of material that, three years ago Tuesday, caused an explosion and underground radiation leak at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. In its current form, the waste cannot be moved out of Texas because it meets neither the U.S. Transportation Department’s shipping requirements, nor WIPP’s waste acceptance criteria.
That means the Department of Energy is “going to have to bring in some mobile treatment capability to treat those containers,” the source said, citing meetings with DOE officials.
It was not clear when DOE might develop the mobile treatment system, or when the technology could be deployed to Waste Control Specialists.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Environmental Management Field Office deferred questions about the mobile waste treatment system’s costs and design to DOE EM headquarters in Washington, which did not reply to multiple requests for comment.
Some 60 barrels of inappropriately remediated nitrate salts remain at Los Alamos, where DOE is zeroing in on a cleanup method. The agency thinks it will finalize a fix this summer for the potentially explosive containers still in its custody. When the fix might be ready to take on the road is less certain, based on DOE’s prior pubic statements.
In September, Doug Hintze, manager of DOE Environmental Management’s Los Alamos Field Office, said nitrate salt waste cleaned up at the lab would not ship to WIPP until some time between 2018 and 2022.
It is likewise unclear who exactly would be in charge of building the mobile waste-treatment system, though it might fall on the shoulders of whoever wins the Los Alamos legacy waste cleanup contract the Environmental Management office put out for bids last year. The current contract held by Los Alamos National Security, which operates the still-active weapons lab for the National Nuclear Security Administration, expires in June. The new deal, which kicks in Oct. 1 but would be awarded before then, would be worth more than $1.5 billion over 10 years, including options.
