The Department of Energy is meeting its commitment to keep the Idaho National Laboratory as the top-priority shipper to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico but still needs to get cracking on other directives from a 2019 update to the key legal settlement between Boise and the federal government, the state said.
The Idaho Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) made the notes in a document the state agency compiled in January. DEQ shared the document recently with Weapons Complex Monitor.
To help keep transuranic waste shipments running smooth, an Idaho nuclear waste official is now receiving copies of the eight-week shipping schedule for the Waste isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). The state is allowed to provide some relief from potential logjams from INL if unforeseen factors such as weather prevent other waste-generating sites in the DOE complex from sending their transuranic waste shipments to WIPP as scheduled, according to the DEQ document.
Also according to the document Idaho has enough transuranic waste already certified and ready to go to WIPP to comply with regularly-scheduled shipments between now and July.
Meanwhile, the state has had to accept that DOE will not begin treating sodium-bearing waste at the lab’s Integrated Waste Treatment Unit quite as soon as expected when the 2019 settlement was signed. That means the agency will not get to ship a tranche of 25 spent nuclear fuel rods from a power plant in Illinois to Idaho as early as it wanted to.
The fuel rods cannot be shipped until DOE and its cleanup contractor Fluor Idaho treat at least one full canister of dry sodium-bearing high-level waste at the long-delayed facility.
DOE and the state expect the treatment unit to start processing that waste by the end of this calendar year, and clear the way for shipping the rods to come to the laboratory for research into high-burnup fuel.
In November 2019, the state of Idaho supplemented its 1995 legal settlement with DOE to allow research quantities of commercial spent nuclear fuel to be brought to the Idaho National Laboratory, so long as certain obligations were met —such as keeping the state atop the transuranic waste shipping queue for WIPP.
In particular, the lab in Idaho continues to account for at least 55% of the shipments to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, based on a three-year average. In 2020, 98 of the 192 shipments received at WIPP, or 51%, came from Idaho. Using the three-year rolling average, however, Idaho’s share is 67%.
Idaho is supposed to remain top priority for WIPP until all legacy transuranic waste at Idaho National Laboratory, including buried waste from places like the old Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado, is shipped to the underground disposal facility in New Mexico.
WIPP is scheduled to receive all the legacy transuranic waste from Idaho by late 2030, according to DOE.
