In a Federal Register notice Tuesday, the Department of Energy said that glass logs produced from low-level radioactive tank waste at the Hanford Site in Washington state can be treated as low-level waste.
DOE published that conclusion after consulting with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, tribes and other local stakeholders in the final “Waste Incidental to Reprocessing Evaluation for Vitrified Low Activity Waste and Secondary Wastes at the Hanford Site.” The determination applies only to less-radioactive liquid waste at Hanford, called low-activity waste. DOE is tackling disposal of the more radioactive high-level waste separately.
The Waste Incidental to Reprocessing evaluation has taken years and predates DOE’s initiative to reconsider treatment options for high-level radioactive waste that started during the Donald Trump administration, according to DOE.
“This determination is not relabeling, renaming, recharacterizing or reclassifying waste,” according to a DOE fact sheet provided to Exchange Monitor through a DOE spokesperson.
The notice in Tuesday’s Federal Register applies to roughly 23.5 million gallons of low-level waste taken from various Hanford underground tanks. It also applies to secondary wastes, liquid or solid, which are a byproduct of vitrification at the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant, the spokesperson said.
The ruling was “expected and necessary,” a spokesperson for the Washington Department of Ecology said in an email. This will allow disposal of the glass cylinders made by the vit plant in “near-surface facilities” rather than a deep underground repository, akin to the proposed Yucca Mountain site in Nevada.
“DOE is using the paths expected by the state, and not the high-level waste redefinition,” the state spokesperson said. The process “shows Hanford’s nuclear tank waste can be appropriately reclassified through an established regulatory process,” the state spokesperson said.
In the Waste Incidental to Reprocessing finding, and a related notice on secondary waste also published Tuesday, DOE envisions using an out-of-state disposal site, Waste Control Specialists’ in Texas, for disposal. DOE will also use Hanford’s Integrated Disposal Facility for that purpose, the state spokesperson said.
That’s a change from a draft of the Waste Incidental to Reprocessing policy spawned by the 2005 National Defense Authorization Act. Back then, it was assumed all secondary waste would be disposed of at Hanford’s Integrated Disposal Facility, according to DOE.
Glass-making at the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant’s Direct Feed Low-Activity Waste facilities is expected to begin between 2023 and 2025.
