DOE TO CONSIDER SITES NEAR WIPP FOR POSSIBLE MERCURY STORAGE

By ExchangeMonitor

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management plans to evaluate two new locations near the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant for the potential siting of a mercury storage facility, according to a notice issued yesterday. The two locations will be added to seven sites being reconsidered as part of a supplemental environmental impact statement being prepared for the planned mercury storage facility. One of the new locations to be considered is across the access road from the main WIPP facility on land subject to the WIPP Land Withdrawal Act, while the other in the vicinity of the WIPP facility but outside of the lands withdrawn by the act, according to the notice. The other seven sites being reconsidered for a potential mercury storage facility include Hanford, the Savannah River Site, the Kansas City Plant, the Idaho National Laboratory, the Grand Junction Disposal Site in Colorado, the Hawthorne Army Depot in Nevada and Waste Control Specialists’ Andrews, Texas, facility.

DOE has been tasked through the Mercury Export Ban Act of 2008 with establishing a long-term storage site for what the Department has estimated is approximately 10,000 metric tons of surplus mercury over the next 40 years. Under that law, DOE was to have identified a storage site by 2010, and to have the site in operation by 2013. In January 2011, DOE published an EIS that favored WCS, though no Record of Decision establishing WCS as the site for a storage facility was completed. In its notice of intent on the new supplemental EIS yesterday, DOE said it was now considering the two locations near WIPP after it “reconsidered the range of reasonable alternatives evaluated” in the first EIS. “Through development of the SEIS, DOE will evaluate the cumulative impacts of constructing and operating a facility for long-term management and storage of elemental mercury with the ongoing and planned operations of WIPP for disposal of defense transuranic waste, as well as the potential disposal of greater-than-Class C waste,” the June 5 notice says.

Comments are closed.