The Energy Department is at risk of missing the 2018 deadline to ship all transuranic waste at the Idaho National Laboratory out of the state, a senior official said recently.
That comes even as the agency has increased its pace of shipments to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico for permanent disposal, Energy Department Idaho Cleanup Project Deputy Director Jack Zimmerman said during a Jan. 31 presentation in Boise to the Leadership in Nuclear Energy (LINE) Commission. He didn’t offer any details.
Under a 1995 legal settlement agreement with the state, DOE is required to ship all transuranic waste at the Idaho National Laboratory out of the state by Dec. 31, 2018. INL had shipped about 55,000 of the 65,000 cubic meters of the waste material by early 2014.
However, waste shipments to WIPP from across the DOE complex were halted for more than three years following a pair of February 2014 accidents in the underground disposal site. Shipments resumed last April.
“The requirement to meet a 2,000 cubic meter running average of shipping TRU to WIPP was missed after WIPP shut down and does not look likely to be met in the future,” Susan Burke, the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality oversight coordinator for INL, said by email Tuesday.
Burke was not certain of the total amount of TRU waste yet to ship out of Idaho. An INL spokesperson, Sarah Neumann, said she did not immediately know the amount either.
The Idaho National Laboratory accounted for 88 of the 133 TRU waste shipments received by WIPP in 2017. In addition, eight of the first 13 shipments sent to WIPP during January came from INL. WIPP had received 13 shipments this year as of Jan. 25, according to the latest publicly available data.
