Moving long-stranded, potentially combustible radioactive waste to the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico from a commercial site in Texas remains a priority, an agency official told a National Academies of Sciences panel this week.
“We are continuing to work on a path forward for the LANL [Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico] waste that is at Waste Control Specialists,” in Andrews County, Texas, Betsy Forinash, acting deputy for DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, told the Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board.
“We still have a number of containers that have RCRA [Resource Conservation and Recovery Act] codes on them” and have been “looking at options for how we might be able to remove those codes,” Forinash said. Such codes address issues including ignitability characteristics, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The codes, identifying the waste as an ignition risk, came about in 2014 after regulators learned some drums rerouted to Waste Control Specialists might pose a combustibility risk – similar to the Los Alamos drum that overheated, ruptured and caused an underground radiation leak at Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in February 2014. Some drums apparently have the same improperly remediated nitrate salts mixture as the drum that overheated at WIPP.
DOE’s review could be done “by looking more carefully at the current condition of the waste rather than the condition when those codes were assigned,” Forinash said. Potential options for treating the transuranic waste to enable shipment is being considered as well, the DOE manager added.
Forinash did not elaborate on treatment options. DOE has proposed installing a radiological-control enclosure at the West Texas site where the waste could be prepared for shipment.
The RCRA codes have been cited for years as a potential hurdle to moving the 74 remaining containers to WIPP or back to Los Alamos.
“The state of Texas is really, uh, interested” in the issue so it is a “high priority,” Forinash said.
While the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last May approved continued storage of the problem transuranic waste through December 2024, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has refused to follow suit.
Texas has threatened enforcement action against DOE’s Office of Environmental Management if it fails to move the waste soon. The state has been pushing DOE since 2019 to move the Los Alamos waste, saying Waste Control Specialists was only supposed to be a temporary stopover.
After multiple state deadline extensions, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality referred the issue to the Texas Attorney General’s office after DOE failed to move the waste by the last one on May 31, 2022, a spokesperson for the Texas commission said in a Wednesday email.
A DOE spokesperson, when asked by Exchange Monitor about negotiations with Texas on the stranded waste, declined to comment in a Wednesday email.
