Washington State politicians do not want the Department of Energy treating high-level waste at the Hanford Site as low-level waste, and a long awaited update to cleanup rules at the site reflects that.
In December 2021, DOE affirmed a policy proposed in 2019 during the Donald Trump administration that the agency could reinterpret an existing definition of high-level waste in a way that would allow some of that waste to be disposed of in low-level waste sites.
Lawmakers from Washington state reacted by using the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act to prohibit application of that reinterpretation at Hanford for the year.
And though DOE has since tested its reinterpretation at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, it has never sought to use it at Hanford, and it is not going to start now.
In the settlement agreement, DOE agreed to refrain from applying its interpretation of what constitutes “high-level waste” when disposing of treated waste or closing tank systems at Hanford, according to a joint press release Monday from DOE, the Washington Department of Ecology and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
“The decision not to use USDOE’s interpretive HLW rule at Hanford is a huge victory,” the executive director of Hanford Challenge Nikolas Peterson said in a Wednesday email to Exchange Monitor. “We’re really happy that EPA and Ecology have held USDOE’s feet to the fire on dealing with Hanford tank waste safely and effectively.”
The settlement agreement, soon to be opened to public comment, keeps in place existing timelines for starting treatment of both low-activity and high-level waste by immobilizing it in glass via vitrification, according to the release. The agreement also calls for constructing a storage vault and second effluent management facility to support treatment of high-level waste.
