The Department of Energy and its Waste Isolation Pilot Plant prime expect to file a draft plan with New Mexico regulators in November seeking to define “legacy” transuranic waste, managers said during a public meeting Tuesday.
The draft will be filed Nov. 3 with the New Mexico Environment Department as required by the new 10-year hazardous waste facility permit for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), said Michael Gerle, environmental compliance director for DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office.
The plan is being drawn up in consultation with waste generator sites and stakeholders, Gerle said. Gerle was a lead speaker at Tuesday’s town hall-style meeting, along with Mike Marksberry, who runs underground operations for WIPP’s Bechtel-led prime Salado Isolation Mining Contractors.
According to the slide presentation by Gerle and Marksberry, most DOE waste-generation sites describe legacy transuranic, mixed transuranic and hazardous waste byproducts of nuclear weapons research that took place no later than the second decade of this century. But there is no formal agreement about this among the sites, where legacy cutoff dates range from 1989 to 2014.
According to the WIPP presentation, the Hanford Site in Washington state dubs all of its waste generated, retrieved or buried before June 2000 as legacy. The Savannah River Site in South Carolina includes any waste characterized as suitable for WIPP disposal prior to a February 2014 underground radiation leak at WIPP. The legacy benchmark for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is prior to Oct. 1, 1999, and the Idaho National Laboratory’s milestone is October 1995.
The same chart indicates the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee sets its legacy benchmark as prior to the 1989 creation of DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, the world’s largest nuclear cleanup program.
Some sites don’t define legacy transuranic waste at all.
The DOE plan, once submitted Nov. 3, will undergo 60 days of public comment. “To the extent practicable,” the planned Panel 12 “will be reserved for the disposal of legacy TRU [transuranic] mixed waste,” according to the slide presentation.
During the question-and-answer session, some WIPP critics stressed the importance of legacy waste at Los Alamos and elsewhere not losing its place in line to newly-generated transuranic waste from plutonium pit production by DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration.
DOE’s Gerle said an internal working paper on the planned legacy waste definition could be ready within a couple of weeks. During a comment session, Steve Zappe, a retiree who spent more than 20 years at NMED, urged DOE to make any such white paper available prior to Nov. 3 to environmental groups and others who actively follow WIPP issues.
