The Energy Department wants a proposed change for counting the volume of transuranic waste disposed of in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico to be retroactive to 1999.
That is among the primary points included in a July 12 letter from Todd Shrader, manager of DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, and Bruce Covert, president and project manager for WIPP contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership, to John Kieling, head of the New Mexico Environment Department’s Hazardous Waste Bureau.
The letter is the official response to the state agency’s June 27 technical incompleteness determination, in which NMED asked DOE to clear up questions about how it proposes to document TRU waste emplaced at WIPP.
In its reply, the Energy Department and its contractor also asserted the 1992 WIPP Land Withdrawal Act did not intend to count the amount of empty space, or “void space” between drums inside larger waste canisters, toward the disposal’s site’s disposal cap of 175,565 cubic meters of material.
Documents that accompanied the Land Withdrawal Act acknowledge many of the containers shipped to WIPP would include a great deal of empty space, particularly for remote-handled transuranic waste, according to the Energy Department letter. The records suggest the “actual waste in the WIPP repository, with no regard for the amount of void space in the container,” should be counted toward the cap, according to the Energy Department.
The Energy Department generator sites have ample documentation on how much empty space was included in the containers sent to the New Mexico facility over the years, DOE said.
Under the current counting method, the agency has empaneled roughly 90,000 cubic meters of waste at WIPP, more than half its limit. The requested modification would shrink the total to about 60,000 cubic meters, meaning WIPP is only about one-third full, Energy Department officials have said.
The Energy Department said it intends to regularly provide updates on the volume of waste emplaced at WIPP under the new calculations at www.wipp.energy.gov.
The Energy Department and Nuclear Waste Partnership on Jan. 31 filed an application to amend the state hazardous waste facility permit for the underground disposal site near the city of Carlsbad. On June 1 the state said the change would be treated as a Class 3 permit modification, which requires a more extensive review and the opportunity for a public hearing. Shrader said in June Class 3 approval could take another year.
The advocacy group Nuclear Watch New Mexico opposes the proposed NMED permit revision, saying the change would delay the point at which WIPP reaches its waste limit under the Land Withdrawal Act. The watchdog group fears the change this is part of a wider effort to expand the amount of waste deposited in WIPP.
