Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
4/3/2015
The Department of Energy’s National TRU Program is kicking off an extensive review of transuranic waste generator sites in response to the radiological release at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant after the existing system of checks and balances failed to catch the drum linked to the release. The February 2014 WIPP release has been linked to a drum processed at Los Alamos National Laboratory containing a volatile mixture of nitrate salts, organic absorbent and other materials—a potentially dangerous combination that wasn’t noted by oversight at DOE’s Los Alamos and Carlsbad field offices. “There were a series of checks and balances that could have caught the situation with the waste stream that is of concern that we think was the cause of the incident,” DOE Carlsbad Field Office National TRU Director J.R. Stroble said last month at the 2015 Waste Management conference in Phoenix.
The review will focus on the checks and balances that failed, including increasing DOE and regulatory oversight, as well as areas related to the handling, processing and management of transuranic waste, and the development of the acceptable knowledge package, Stroble said. “It’s actually going to be an integrated team of people from the generator sites along with our office going to each one of the generator sites. In addition to the existing certification program, we’ll be taking a closer look at the things that are going on with transuranic waste before it gets to a certified program,” he said, adding later, “It will be a high-level look at processes and programs and it will be a detailed look at procedures and operations going on at facilities today.”
Officials Signed Off On Los Alamos Plan
The issues with the suspect drum at WIPP stretches back to a particularly challenging batch of nitrate salt drums at Los Alamos. Remediation of the drums was put off for six months while processing methods were refined. A plan for processing the material underwent numerous revisions before being finalized and signed off on by Carlsbad’s Central Characterization Project and Los Alamos National Laboratory officials in the summer of 2012, followed by a restart of drum remediation that fall. However, the revised plan included a provision calling for workers to “ensure an organic absorbent … is added to the waste material,” a key factor in the combustible mixture in the suspect drum. That was later traced back in part to a note taking error by a technical writer, who jotted down “an organic” instead of “inorganic” in a handwritten revision that was later incorporated into the plan.
The drums with organic absorbent had an “ignitability” characteristic, which should have barred them from disposal in WIPP—an issue not caught by Carlsbad and Los Alamos officials until after the WIPP radiological release. “It wasn’t part of the WIPP design to operate or withstand a waste form that was exhibiting the characteristic of ignitability,” Stroble said. “That wasn’t the intent of the processes that generated that waste or that remediated that waste. The intent was to put it in a more benign characteristic, not create that characteristic, so that’s where those mistakes were made.”
The new review aims to prevent other issues from slipping through the cracks. Carlsbad’s National TRU program oversees generator sites across the country, including Idaho, Hanford, Oak Ridge and Savannah River. “The Carlsbad Field Office certifies every site that wants to bring TRU waste to WIPP for disposal and we verify they are meeting all of the requirements before the waste is even packaged and put on the road. That even occurred with the one waste container we had trouble with,” Stroble said. “What we are learning from that is that there is more that we could know about what is going on with the management of transuranic waste and there’s a closer look that we need to take together at what’s going on with transuranic waste all the way from its origin to a certified program.”
More Verification of Acceptable Knowledge
For example, DOE will focus on verifying the acceptable knowledge information—the foundation for characterizing waste, comprised of an exhaustive history and contents of any particular waste stream. “One of the things that we need to focus on is true, detailed and maybe even duplicative verification of those inputs. Because what we’ve learned so far, and we probably have more to learn, is that you can’t check those enough,” Stroble said. “If you are not checking them at the right level something may make its way through the process that you didn’t intend to make it through.”
Increased Oversight
Additionally, DOE plans to increase oversight. “We are hoping that by increasing that oversight that it doesn’t slow things down, but it gives us another set of eyes to catch that one thing that might happen. If we could prevent it from happening, it will be well worth it,” Stroble said. He added later: “There’s a certain level of state oversight and a certain level of federal oversight that currently exists that also may need to change. So we are anticipating that we are going to need to not only create a new program to do this kind of oversight, but we are going to need to involve many organizations with us so that we can together be looking at all of the processes that TRU waste is managed under so that we can avoid that one thing from happening again.”
