The Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state should transport between 10 and 20 shipments of transuranic material to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico starting in 2028.
The vast majority (99%) of the defense-related transuranic waste now at Hanford’s central plateau, in the 200 West Area, will be hauled to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) by 2040, Kelly Ebert, a project and facilities manager with DOE’s Richland Operations Office said during a May 13 presentation.
For now, the waste is stored in the Central Waste Complex and the Low-Level Burial Grounds. Hanford last sent shipments to WIPP in 2011, according to a public database maintained by the New Mexico site.
Transuranic waste contains man made elements heavier than uranium on the periodic table and generally consists of protective clothing, tools, and equipment used in nuclear weapons work or reprocessing. At Hanford, much of this material is stored in trenches.
Speakers from DOE and the Washington Department of Ecology conducted the virtual public meeting on changes to the Tri-Party Agreement’s timeline for retrieving, treating and disposing of this waste. Under a revised milestone proposed in February by DOE, the state and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the deadline for removing Hanford’s transuranic waste would be delayed from 2030 to 2050.
The obvious question is “why is the Department of Ecology in favor of these changes,” John Price, nuclear section manager with the Washington Department of Ecology, said during the virtual meeting. For starters, it was “impossible for DOE to finish by the previous 2030 date,” he said.
The February 2014 underground radiation leak at WIPP forced the disposal facility to stop taking shipments for about three years, Price said. Although WIPP reopened in 2017, it continues to run at only partial capacity because of reduced underground ventilation, he added, noting the facility still cannot simultaneously emplace waste and mine salt to create new disposal space. That will not change until WIPP finishes construction of a new underground ventilation system within four years, according to the most recent DOE projection.
The DOE is proposing to move WIPP’s closure date to 2050 from 2030 and Washington state’s chief concern is preventing the Hanford transuranic waste timeline from slipping 20 years, Price said. This schedule calls for 99% of the waste to be transported to WIPP from Hanford by 2040, which makes this more like a 10-year delay, he added.
Other DOE locations, such as the Idaho National Laboratory, are currently ahead of Hanford in the WIPP shipping queue. “Once we get into the 2030s, it is going to be our time,” and Hanford will become the primary shipper to WIPP,” Price said.
Comments are being taken between now and June 14 by the three agencies that signed the 1989 Tri-Party Agreement.
