The Energy Department’s Carlsbad Field Office (CBFO) is talking with officials in Washington state about long-term plans for resuming shipments of transuranic waste from the Hanford Site to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
It has been eight years since DOE sent waste from the former plutonium production complex to the underground disposal complex.
Representatives from the CBFO, which oversees WIPP, will meet with managers from Hanford and the Washington state Department of Ecology to discuss the subject during April or May, Kenneth Princen, assistant manager for DOE’s National TRU Program (NTP), said March 4 during a presentation at the Waste Management Symposia in Phoenix, Ariz.
“We are figuring out what we can do to get them on the schedule,” Princen said.
This means ensuring Hanford meets WIPP’s waste acceptance criteria, which was updated following the February 2014 underground radiation release that kept the site offline for about three years. Certification can take a couple years and requires adequate funding, training, and staffing at the generator site, Princen said.
While the Idaho National Laboratory has been the predominant shipper since WIPP resumed taking waste from DOE generators in April 2017, its inventory is shrinking. Resumption of waste shipments from Hanford could help fill the void, Princen said. “We are looking for Hanford to be the next generator to come in there and pick up that level of shipping.”
Between 2000 and 2011, Hanford sent roughly 572 TRU waste shipments to New Mexico. Hanford still has several thousand containers of TRU waste on-site.
The Washington Department of Ecology has been negotiating with the Energy Department about milestones for managing Hanford TRU waste, Ecology spokesman Randy Bradbury said by email. “There are existing milestones but we need to make adjustments because of the impact of the past WIPP shutdown/slowdown,” he said.
