Lowering the hazard classification of some defense-nuclear waste could save the Department of Energy more than $200 billion in disposal costs, the agency told Congress in a report three years in the making.
Most of the potential savings, between roughly $70 billion and $200 billion, would come from reclassifying low-activity waste at the Hanford West Area tank site in Washington state, according to the report. DOE also identified candidate waste tranches at the Idaho National Laboratory — solid, granular sodium-bearing waste — and the Savannah River Site — vitrified waste — which if reclassified could save as much as $15 billion and $5 billion, respectively.
DOE published the 44-page report on Monday. The document is dated December 2020. Congress ordered the report as part of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act signed into law in December 2017. The House and Senate Armed Services Committees got copies of the report, as did the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
The Energy Communities Alliance interest group, which represents communities that host DOE nuclear sites, pushed hard for the recently published reclassification report, which could bolster the case for moving waste out of host locales sooner than anticipated. Environmental groups have generally opposed reclassification, with some saying the strategy is an effort to save money and speed cleanup without regard for safety.
Congress did impose some limits on waste reclassification.
Under the law, DOE may only consider reclassifying waste from the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel for defense activities. Such waste may contain no more than 100 nanocuries per gram of alpha-emitting isotopes of elements heavier than uranium with half lives greater than 20 years. That, DOE wrote in the report, is the sort of transuranic waste the agency already buries deep underground in its Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M.
Under the 2018 defense act, DOE can also consider for reclassification any waste that “may be classified, managed, treated, and disposed of, regardless of origin or previous classification, as other than high-level radioactive waste.”
The DOE announced in June 2019 after a public comment period that not all waste resulting from spent nuclear fuel reprocessing poses enough radiological risk to be treated as high-level waste. As a pilot, the agency in 2020 sent some reclassified waste to the commercially operated Waste Control Specialists disposal site in west Texas from the Savannah River Site.
Other than the pilot program with Waste Control Specialists, DOE had not at the time of this writing sent any reclassified waste to a commercial site nor announced plans to do so. Waste Control Specialists has stored some transuranic waste for DOE since 2014, but the tranche is from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and unrelated to fuel reprocessing.
As for WIPP, DOE would need to modify its agreement with host state New Mexico before it could alter the facility and its disposal rules to accept some potentially reclassifiable waste, according to the report. New Mexico has been holding out on changes to the WIPP agreement, seeking further infrastructure investment and guarantees from DOE.
Editor’s note, Jan. 05, 2021, 5:38 p.m. Eastern time: the Monitor removed from the story references to proposed interim fuel storage sites subject to Nuclear Regulatory Commission oversight.
