The Department of Energy’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 site.
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. The Idaho National Laboratory has already shipped roughly 58,000 of 65,000 cubic meters of on-site legacy waste, covered by a 1995 settlement agreement, to WIPP. The rest of the remaining 7,000 cubic meters should be gone within a year.
Currently, DOE expects to take some TRU waste from Idaho for at least 10 more years albeit not at today’s levels.
Resumption of waste shipments from Hanford could help fill the void of reduced INL shipments, Princen said. “We are looking for Hanford to be the next generator to come in there and pick up that level of shipping.”
Hanford has roughly 15,000 cubic meters of transuranic waste remaining for eventual shipment to WIPP, according to DOE. Between 2000 and 2011, Hanford sent roughly 572 TRU waste shipments to New Mexico.
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.
The timing for a meeting between Hanford, state regulators, and WIPP managers is not yet final, a DOE spokesperson at Hanford said Tuesday. “Once we agree on certification and shipment schedules, we will include the necessary funding requests in the normal budget planning process.”
Since resuming emplacement, WIPP has taken waste from INL, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, Waste Control Specialists in Texas, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico plan to ship to WIPP this year.
Idaho accounted for 243 of the 311 shipments to WIPP during 2018. In the current year, INL has accounted for 33 of the 36 shipments to the disposal site as of Feb. 28, based on publicly available data. The other three shipments came from Oak Ridge.
