The Department of Energy said Tuesday it is considering sending the nation’s entire stock of Greater-Than-Class C and GTCC-like low-level radioactive waste (LLRW) for disposal at a specialized facility in West Texas.
The proposal is addressed in a site-specific assessment of the potential environmental effects of shipping and holding the material at the Federal Waste Facility on Waste Control Specialists’ 14,900-acre property in Andrews County. The Energy Department noted the report does not represent a formal determination to proceed with this approach, which would be established in a record of decision to be issued at a later date.
Separately, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission this week said it would expedite its own process for potentially updating federal regulations that currently prohibit depositing the waste at the Texas site.
“WCS is pleased to see continued progress by the DOE on GTCC, and we look forward to action by the NRC on a draft regulatory basis for GTCC disposal,” Waste Control Specialists President and Chief Operating Officer David Carlson said Tuesday by email.
If both proceedings reach a successful conclusion, the federal government might finally resolve one of its longstanding nuclear waste disposal dilemmas. However, there are a number of regulatory steps ahead and no clear picture yet of when that process might conclude. “It is premature to discuss implementation steps such as starting shipments,” an Energy Department spokesman said by email Thursday.
As its name suggests, Greater-Than-Class C waste is any form of low-level waste with radionuclide concentrations greater than those for Class C material. It encompasses sealed sources, scrap metal, and other materials produced by government and commercial nuclear operations such as cleanup of the West Valley Site in New York state and decommissioning of nuclear power plants. Today it is stored in various states.
Greater-Than-Class C-like waste has similar characteristics and refers specifically to low-level and non-defense transuranic wastes produced or owned by the Department of Energy. This material is stored at DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and Oak Ridge Reservation, among other locations.
The 1985 Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Amendments Act made DOE responsible for disposal of GTCC waste. The law does not cover the GTCC-like waste, but the Energy Department is combining them for purposes of disposal.
The United States presently has no designated means of disposal for this waste, the DOE environmental assessment notes. In a 2016 environmental impact statement, the agency said its preferred approach would be generic commercial facilities and/or the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant transuranic waste disposal facility in New Mexico.
Following a 2014 underground radiation release, WIPP is not expected to resume full waste emplacement levels until 2021, the Energy Department said last December in a report to Congress. That winnowed the list of options largely down to commercial LLRW sites.
The Federal Waste Facility is designated for below-surface disposal of low-level and mixed-low-level radioactive waste for which the U.S. government is responsible. It will have sufficient capacity to accept the full anticipated inventory of 12,000 cubic meters of GTCC and GTCC-like waste, roughly half of which exists today and the rest expected to be generated in the future, the DOE report says.
The new evaluation from DOE’s Office of Environmental Managment says there is minimal danger to climate, air quality, geology and soils, and water resources from this disposal approach. That conclusion seems likely to face skepticism from environmental organizations and some oil and gas concerns in the region, which are already raising red flags over a separate Waste Control Specialists effort to ship and store spent fuel from commercial nuclear reactors at its site.
The Dallas-based waste management specialist has been open about pursuing the GTCC business stream for its multi-facility disposal complex, both under prior owner Valhi Inc. and under the new management put in place after private equity firm J.F. Lehman & Co. bought the company in January.
There are three other commercial operations for low-level radioactive waste in the United States: sites in Utah and South Carolina operated by EnergySolutions and a facility operated by US Ecology in Washington state. US Ecology has said publicly it has no interest in disposal of GTCC waste; EnergySolutions has not been as direct and declined to comment Thursday.
For now, multiple barriers remain to disposal of the material at the WCS Federal Waste Facility It is still prohibited by Texas environmental regulations, while federal regulations from 1989 say GTCC waste must be disposed of in a geologic repository licensed by the NRC unless another option receives agency approval.
In 2014, WCS asked the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to revise regulations so it could accept GTCC, GTCC-like, and transuranic wastes at its state-licensed facilities. Texas is an agreement state to the NRC, meaning it has assumed much of the authority for regulating radioactive materials within its borders. Still, in January 2015 the Texas panel asked its federal counterpart for clarity regarding state authority for authorizing disposal of GTCC waste.
In December of that year, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission told agency staff to prepare a regulatory basis that would determine whether there was justification to proceed with a rulemaking to update the regulations for disposal of GTCC and transuranic waste via near-surface or other methods beyond deep geologic disposal. The draft version of the regulatory basis would be due half a year after completion of a separate rulemaking on low-level radioactive waste disposal under Part 61 of the Code of Federal Regulations.
Agency staff now expects to issue supplemental rules for the Part 61 proceeding in early 2019, but the NRC isn’t waiting to move ahead with the GTCC regulatory basis.
“Given the long pendency of the proposed revisions to 10 CFR Part 61, the staff should decouple to the extent practicable the issuance of the draft Regulatory Basis … from Commission action on Part 61. This decoupling would allow for earlier public engagement on staff’s analysis of any potential regulatory barriers to the disposal of Greater than Class C waste,” NRC Secretary to the Commission Annette Vietti-Cook wrote in a memo Tuesday to Executive Director for Operations Margaret Doane.
A schedule for developing the GTCC waste disposal regulatory basis is still being developed, an NRC spokesman said Wednesday. During an Oct. 11 commission meeting, John Tappert, director of the NRC Division of Decommissioning, Uranium Recovery, & Waste Programs, said staff was already preparing a draft regulatory analysis of the potential rulemaking.
The timeline for the regulatory process remains hazy, but it will involve multiple steps, Carlson said: some still-unspecified response from Congress to the 2017 DOE report on disposal, the Energy Department record of decision, and then regulatory action by the NRC and Texas.
The Department of Energy this week said there was no schedule yet for issuing its record of decision for GTCC and GTCC-like waste disposal.
The NRC spokesman said he could not speculate on the schedule for the agency’s potential rulemaking.
A spokesman for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality said language in the Texas Administrative Code that address radioactive substances would also have to be revised to allow for this disposal plan at Waste Control Specialists. He could not say how long that would require.
