SUMMERLIN, NEV. — By June 30, the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup office expects to provide the Texas attorney general with a “detailed schedule” for retrieving boxes of transuranic waste stranded at a private disposal site in Andrews County for nearly a decade.
In a May 10 letter to Phillip Ledbetter, managing enforcement lawyer with the Texas attorney general’s office, Douglas Tonkay, a waste and materials management executive with DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, said to expect “an implementation sequence and detailed schedule for waste retrieval and removal” of 74 containers from Waste Control Specialists by month’s end.
By that point, a “radiological control enclosure” should be built and operational, Tonkay said in the letter, which DOE shared with the Exchange Monitor Wednesday.
This enclosure is important to DOE’s long-anticipated plans for moving the remaining 74 Standard Waste Boxes, which hold a total of 258 containers of transuranic waste, according to the letter, discussed by a Texas Commission on Environmental Quality official this week at the Exchange Monitor’s Radwaste Summit 2.0.
“They are moving forward with getting the building ready to eventually move the waste,” Ashley Forbes, deputy director of the radioactive materials division at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, said Tuesday in answer to a question from Exchange Monitor.
After her presentation, Forbes said if the drums were going to ignite it would have happened by now and DOE, as the federal generator of the waste, has authority to remove the hazardous designation. Forbes also believes that turnover in DOE cleanup middle management has drawn out the process.
In May, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission concluded no significant harm would result from moving 74 containers of potentially-ignitable transuranic waste, originally from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, to one area of the Waste Control Specialists site from another.
The containers ended up at Waste Control Specialists after a February 2014 underground radiation leak from drums of similar waste emplaced deep underground in DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M.
Soon after the leak, DOE determined that some of the containers diverted to the commercial site in Texas were similar to the Los Alamos drum that overheated and caused the WIPP accident.
Since 2014, DOE deemed 324 of the containers sent to Waste Control Specialists safe enough to move out. Those have been disposed of at WIPP, according to the DOE letter.
“DOE remains committed to safely removing this TRU waste from WCS,” the agency said in the letter.
Texas regulators have been pushing DOE since 2019 to remove the transuranic waste from the state and has stopped issuing incremental extensions of state approval for the waste to remain in Andrews County.
The DOE believes the waste is now safe to ship, Mark Bollinger, manager of the agency’s Carlsbad Field Office, which oversees WIPP, said here Wednesday. DOE will be working with the state and other regulators on the planned transfer, he added. It has not yet been determined if the waste boxes will eventually be shipped straight to WIPP, or first go back to Los Alamos for additional preparation.
