By spring, the Energy Department should be ready to make safe a tranche of the same kind of potentially explosive transuranic waste that leaked radiation into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant more than two years ago.
The waste, known as inappropriately remediated nitrate salt, is currently sitting idle in the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s (LANL) Area G nuclear waste storage site. After a key safety approval late last month by a senior lab official, the waste is now clear to move over to Area G’s Waste Characterization, Reduction and Repackaging Facility, where workers using protective glove boxes can begin making the salt safe for transport to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP).
“[T]he Laboratory expects to begin movement of remediated nitrate salt waste drums in the first quarter of calendar year 2017,” DOE spokeswoman Toni Chiri said by email Thursday.
In a mid-September industry gathering, Doug Hintze, manager of DOE’s Environmental Management Field Office at Los Alamos, said the 60 barrels of LANL nitrate salt waste would be treated by summer 2017 and ready to ship to WIPP sometime between 2018 and 2022.
DOE marked a paperwork milestone needed to gel that timeline somewhat after a two-day meeting of senior officials with the agency’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and Office of Environmental Management.
After the meeting ended Sept. 29, Patrick Cahalane, NNSA’s principal deputy associate administrator for safety, infrastructure and operations, approved a safety evaluation report that clears the way for treatment of the problematic waste stream sometime in 2017. The report has not been made public.
The inappropriately remediated nitrate salt is leftover from Cold War-era plutonium production at LANL. DOE found the waste was mistakenly packaged with organic kitty litter that later mixed with the nitrate salts in an explosive combination that blew the lid off a waste barrel deep underground at WIPP in February 2014.
WIPP has been closed ever since. The Department of Energy wants to reopen the mine in December or January, and to start accepting new deliveries of transuranic waste by April, according to agency timelines shared publicly this summer. However, DOE has yet to decide the order in which its cleanup sites get to start clearing their considerable backlogs of transuranic waste.
Even after DOE treats the 60 barrels of problematic nitrate salts at LANL, it will still have to deal with more than 100 containers of similarly packaged nitrate salts at Waste Control Specialists’ commercially owned and operated storage site near Andrews, Texas, about 1 mile from New Mexico’s southeast border. That waste may not legally be moved to LANL, or disposed of at WIPP until it is made safe.
Meanwhile, in WIPP’s Panel 6 and Panel 7 disposal areas, there remain more than 300 untreated containers of organic kitty litter and nitrate salts.
