The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is taking comments through April 19 on whether to sign off on the updated transuranic waste characterization program at the Energy Department’s Idaho National Laboratory Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project. An affirmative decision could lead to AMWTP shipping TRU waste to DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
Energy Department criteria for accepting waste shipments at WIPP have been tightened to reduce the chances of recurrence of the February 2014 incident in which a waste container blew open and released radiation into the salt mine. A three-day EPA baseline inspection in August 2017 found no concerns with the updated waste characterization for the AMWTP, the agency said in a March 5 Federal Register notice.
The EPA’s final approval decision regarding the AMWTP program for characterizing contact-handled TRU waste will be spelled out in a letter to DOE following review of public comments, according to the notice.
The AMWTP was built to treat and package TRU waste shipped to the Idaho National Laboratory in the 1970s and 1980s from the Rocky Flats site in Colorado. Under a 1995 settlement agreement between DOE and Idaho, all the waste must be shipped out of the state by the end of 2018 — 65,000 cubic meters at the time.
The environmental agency must finalize its “baseline approval decision” before the DOE Carlsbad Field Office, which oversees WIPP, can recertify the AMWTP waste characterization program, according to the Federal Register notice.
The EPA approved the AMWTP waste characterization program in October 2006. But the June 2017 changes to DOE’s acceptance standards for transuranic waste at WIPP now require information on the chemical contents of material headed to WIPP. The revisions also require confirmation the waste has been rendered chemically inert. The EPA believes improvements implemented by AMWTP bring the waste characterization program up to the toughened WIPP standards.
