Martin Schneider
WC Monitor
10/24/2014
AMELIA ISLAND, Fla.—The Department of Energy this week sought to clarify the steps it will be taking to mitigate the impact of the current shutdown of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant on sites across the complex, reiterating that DOE will not reclassify transuranic waste as a means to seek alternate disposal. “One thing that I want to emphasize is that we do not permit previously treated or packaged TRU waste that was planned for disposal at WIPP to be simply reclassified as low level waste to enable disposal on or off site at low-level waste disposal facilities,” DOE Deputy Assistant Secretary for Waste Management Frank Marcinowski said here this week at the Weapons Complex Monitor Decisionmakers’ Forum.
The sole disposal site for transuranic waste, WIPP was shut down by incidents in February and will likely remain closed through at least 2015. However, DOE still remains committed to meeting compliance milestones and mitigating impacts of the WIPP outage, the Department has said. Notably, though, reclassification of waste has never been on the table for the Department as a mitigation strategy, nor is it permitted under DOE regulations. DOE does have a host of options at its disposal, however, in how it addresses waste that has been conservatively managed as part of the transuranic waste inventory. Under DOE’s waste order, waste is not classified until it is process and packaged into its final form. As such, there is the possibility that waste previously managed as TRU waste could ultimately be determined to be low-level waste after processing, packaging and full characterization.
Another possibility to continue making progress involves consolidation, or blending, of waste, a practice DOE has employed in the past. Under DOE’s policy, the Department can take two different waste streams and within certain limits combine them before giving it its official classification, a strategy that is already being employed at Idaho, the site with one of the most pressing regulatory commitments. In the past, some of the mixed low level waste inventory was blended up at Idaho’s Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project because previously offsite mixed waste could not be shipped to Nevada or a commercial facility. “Now there’s the opportunity to revisit the flow sheet up there and see if we can’t now focus on generating Mixed Low Level Waste and avoiding the blend up and really focus on driving the waste streams to the lowest possible disposition path that is technically and compliantly achievable,” Associate Deputy Assistant Secretary for Waste Management Christine Gelles said at a workshop on mitigation strategies held in conjunction with the RadWaste Summit in September.
When asked this week whether DOE will actively try to minimize the amount of transuranic waste as it processes and characterizes waste that is currently being managed as part of the TRU waste inventory but has not been classified, a DOE spokesperson said in a written response to WC Monitor: “Consistent with our risk informed waste management processes we strive to disposition waste at the lowest waste class that is technically achievable, regulatorily compliant and protective of human health and the environment. DOE continues to process legacy TRU waste for ultimate disposition at WIPP and low-level and mixed low-level wastes for disposal.”
