The Energy Facility Contractors Group (EFCOG) has thrown its weight behind the Department of Energy’s case for reinterpreting the definition of high-level radioactive waste based primarily on its risk characteristics and not its source of origin.
The organization, representing about 100 DOE contractors, filed its formal comments endorsing the reinterpretation shortly after the department proposed the idea in October. Its position aligns with groups such as the Energy Communities Alliance (ECA) and the U.S. Nuclear Industry Council, agreeing with DOE that much of what is now treated as high-level waste has traits similar to low-level waste.
“The interpretation of a waste form based on its risk-significance to the public and environment is a more robust technical interpretation than the existing source-based approach,” according to a letter co-signed by EFCOG Chair Billy Morrison and Sonny Goldston, who heads the organization’s working group on waste management.
The proposal would allow DOE to reclassify high-level waste if it can meet the radioactive concentration limits for low-level radioactive waste, or if the waste can be safely disposed of outside of an underground geologic repository. The United States does not yet have such a repository for high-level waste, which would be licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, not DOE.
If liquid waste now stored in large underground tanks at DOE sites “is determined to meet LLW disposal criteria and limits, then the waste should be classified and managed as LLW,” according to EFCOG. Low-level waste disposal facilities licensed by the NRC could provide a safe and timely path forward for certain tank waste now treated as high-level waste. This approach is “certainly much safer than continuing to store liquids in aging tanks,” the group said.
The contractor organization also noted the Energy Communities Alliance’s report in 2017 that the Energy Department could save billions without hurting public safety by making the type of change the agency is now proposing.
The report stimated $40 billion on the remaining life-cycle cost of DOE’s Environmental Management costs, which now stand at more than $257 billion. This would be achieved by emplying a more risk-based approach to what is high-level waste and taking advantage of some near-term advances in waste management.
A January 2017 Government Accountability Office report estimated DOE holds 14,000 metric tons of defense-related nuclear waste, consisting of HLW and spent nuclear fuel. The DOE has yet to publish data on what amount of high-level waste might be recategorized under the change.
The DOE comment period ended Jan. 9 after a 30-day extension. The agency has said it has made no decision on any policy change, and some sources question if it will actually move forward with the HLW revision.
The state governments of Oregon and Washington, along with advocacy groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, oppose the DOE revision, saying it could cause significant amounts of highly radioactive material from nuclear reprocessing to be left at places such as the Hanford Site in Washington state and the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York.
Material now categorized as HLW must go into a deep geologic repository, and DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is legally only allowed to take defense transuranic waste.
In strongly worded comments, the Natural Resources Defense Council and other advocacy groups last week said the proposed reinterpretation would violate the law and should be withdrawn.
The Energy Department “has issued this HLW Reinterpretation Proposal in hopes of providing for itself the authority to define away its most difficult and expensive cleanup problem” while providing no “intelligible criteria whatsoever,” the groups said in comments filed Jan. 9. “Thus, removing vast amounts of HLW by a semantic wave of a magic reinterpretation wand could have enormous cost savings for DOE.”
Congress has designated high-level waste as the “highly radioactive” material resulting from spent fuel reprocessing – the act of separating ingredients in irradiated nuclear fuel and target materials, such as plutonium. Reprocessing waste is treated as high-level “and defined by its origin because it is both “intensely radioactive and long-lived,” the groups said.
The reinterpretation would run counter to congressional directions in the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act and could allow the Donald Trump administration, or future presidential administrations, “to abandon extraordinary amounts of the world’s most toxic waste at nuclear weapons cleanup sites across the country” by deeming it non-HLW, the groups said. They added that it could lead to “misguided expansions” of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant – where some waste could theoretically be shipped for disposal if reclassified.
The 39 pages of comments, plus 200 pages of exhibits, were filed by the NRDC, Hanford Challenge, Columbia Riverkeeper, Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Southwest Research and Information Center, Snake River Alliance, SRS Watch, and the Institute for Policy Studies.
The proposal would allow DOE to reclassify high-level waste if it can meet the radioactive concentration limits for low-level radioactive waste, or if the waste can be safely disposed of outside of an underground geologic repository. The United States does not yet have such a repository for high-level waste, which the groups note would be licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, not DOE.
The groups question if DOE has authority to create a new category of non-hazardous radioactive waste.
