The Energy Department’s Environmental Management (EM) Field Office at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is studying potential strategies for dealing with combustible waste stored at a private facility in West Texas.
Between 300 and 400 drums of waste from Los Alamos have been held at Waste Control Specialists storage complex in Andrews County for several years. Of those, 113 drums contain what is called “inappropriately remediated nitrate salts” – substantially identical to the waste in a Los Alamos-origin drum that blew open and released radiation into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico in February 2014, closing the underground transuranic waste repository for nearly three years.
DOE is “in the middle of a feasibility study for how we’re going to address treatment of those drums,” Doug Hintze, manager of the DOE EM Los Alamos Field Office, said at the department’s annual Nuclear Cleanup Workshop in Alexandria, Va.
A Los Alamos EM spokesman said Wednesday the study is intended to “determine the path forward” for the waste, but said additional details of the planning were not immediately available. The report is expected to be submitted to DOE in early 2018, which would be followed by an extended review.
“Nothing has been determined at this point,” the spokesman said.
Another 60 drums of inappropriately remediated nitrate salts remained at Los Alamos after the WIPP incident. As of Wednesday, Hintze said, waste from 35 drums have been mixed with an inert substance to prevent further combustion incidents. Treatment of the waste, along with 29 containers of unremediated nitrate salts, is expected to be completed in April 2018. That waste will eventually be sent to WIPP.
The drums at Waste Control Specialists beyond the 113 containers of nitrate salts hold completely separate wastes that do not pose a similar danger, the Los Alamos spokesman said. The Energy Department has already transported a number of those containers to WIPP since it reopened to waste shipments from across the DOE complex in April.
