The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission should establish a new classification for radioactive waste – “Class D” – to replace the more nebulous Greater Than Class C designation, according to disposal provider EnergySolutions.
“The NRC should designate a new waste category specifically defining what it is. It should not be defined by what it is greater than, or what it isn’t,” the company told the industry regulator on April 16. “We support a rulemaking that would define a specific waste category for what is now known as GTCC and transuranic waste.”
The Salt Lake City-based nuclear services provider, which operates low-level radioactive waste disposal facilities in Utah and South Carolina, was responding to a request for comments from the NRC as it considers a potential rulemaking for disposal of nongovernment GTCC and transuranic waste.
Interested parties had until April 16 to file comments on a regulatory basis being prepared by the NRC to address scientific, technical, and legal issues for a possible rulemaking on disposal of the waste types in near-surface systems or other non-deep geologic repository sites. The regulatory basis could be finished in late 2018 or early 2019, based on the NRC’s schedule.
Greater-Than-Class C-waste is classified as low-level radioactive waste with radionuclide concentrations above the limits set in the NRC’s designation for Class C low-level waste.
In 2016, the Department of Energy said it supported disposal of GTCC and GTCC-like waste in generic commercial land facilities and/or its deep-underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. Along with EnergySolutions’ properties, the only two active commercial LLRW disposal sites licensed by the NRC are Waste Control Specialists’ facility in Andrews County, Texas, and a US Ecology site on DOE’s Hanford Site in Washington state.
It could be reasonable to place Class D waste in near-surface systems, EnergySolutions told the NRC.
“Waste that does not fall into that category will be de facto high-level radioactive waste that would require disposal in a geologic repository,” the company said.
