A major defense policy bill would effectively block the U.S. Department of Energy from applying its new interpretation of high-level radioactive waste during fiscal 2020 in Washington state.
That would cover the Hanford Site, a former plutonium production complex that is DOE’s largest cleanup project and home to much of its high-level waste.
The fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which easily passed the House of Representatives on Wednesday, prevents the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management from spending money for any “reclassification” of high-level waste in Washington state to a lower hazard status that might allow the material to be disposed of somewhere other than a permanent geological repository. The Senate plans to take up the measure next week and President Donald Trump is expected to sign it.
The high-level waste language, pushed by House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.), was included in the compromise NDAA between the House and Senate.
High-level waste, by law, currently must go into permanent disposal in a deep geologic repository. The nation still lacks an underground disposal site for high-level waste at Yucca Mountain, Nev., or anywhere else, leaving most of it stranded at DOE facilities such as the Savannah River in South Carolina, the Hanford Site, and the Idaho National Laboratory. The Energy Department oversees about 90 million gallons of liquid radioactive waste in underground tanks and another 4,000 cubic meters of solid waste, both leftover from decades of nuclear weapons production, the agency’s Office of Inspector General said recently.
In June, the Energy Department revised its interpretation of the definition of high-level waste in the Atomic Energy Act and the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. The new interpretation declares not all waste resulting from reprocessing of nuclear spent fuel is radioactive enough to warrant deep underground disposal. As a result, the agency says some of this material could be shipped to facilities for disposal of low-level radioactive waste licensed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission or one of its agreement states.
There are currently four commercial low-level waste disposal facilities, all in NRC agreement states: South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Washington.
Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee (D) has opposed the reinterpretation, even though the Energy Department says it has not made plans to apply it to Hanford. Inslee supports Smith’s efforts to keep Hanford unaffected by the reinterpretation, at least for the near term.
The NDAA language in the conference report does not cover high-level waste at other Energy Department sites, and a pilot program is underway for radioactive wastewater at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Initially, Smith sought to insert language into the NDAA giving all governors’ veto power over HLW reinterpretation in their states.
Comment Period, Public Meeting Set on Commercial Disposal of SRS Wastewater
On Tuesday, the Energy Department released a draft environmental assessment for its proposal to treat and dispose of up to 10,000 gallons of recycled wastewater from the Savannah River Site at a commercial low-level radioactive waste site somewhere outside South Carolina.
This would be the first test run of DOE’s high-level waste reinterpretation.
The Energy Department believes the recycled wastewater from the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) could be treated as low-level waste because of its radiological risk. The agency is inviting comments on this pilot effort and will subsequently issue a finding of no significant impact, or decide that a more comprehensive environmental impact statement is required.
“This process is part of DOE’s science-based approach to manage radioactive waste and to identify potential off-site disposal options for long-stored reprocessing waste that are fully protective of human health and the environment,” the agency said in a statement released Tuesday when the notice was published in the Federal Register.
The Energy Department is taking comments on the draft through Jan. 9, according to the Federal Register notice.
The agency will also hold a public meeting on the draft document, including a poster session followed by a half-hour presentation, from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 17, at the Augusta Marriott at the Convention Center, 2 Tenth St. in Augusta, Ga. Instructions on how to access the session via WebEx can be found here.
The Defense Waste Processing Facility, open since 1996, converts radioactive sludge waste into glass for disposal. The recycled wastewater from the DWPF comes mostly from condensates in the vitrification process. The Energy Department has identified three options for the DWPF recycled wastewater from the SRS H-Area Tank Farm.
One option involves setting up a treatment capability at Savannah River to grout the material into a stable form before shipping it either about 1,400 miles from the Waste Control Specialists site in Andrews County, Texas or about 2,200 miles to the EnergySolutions site near Clive, Utah.
The second alternative would be to stabilize the 10,000 gallons at either WCS or EnergySolutions. A third option would be sending the wastewater to a licensed commercial treatment facility for stabilization prior to shipment to a disposal site. Conceivably, the wastewater could even travel 2,655 miles to a commercial treatment facility at Richland, Wash., for stabilization, according to the draft environmental assessment for the project. This facility was not identified in the document, but it appears both Perma-Fix Northwest and US Ecology both operate nuclear waste treatment facilities near Richland. But the Richland site was included in the assessment largely to provide an “upper bound estimate” on potential transport costs, according to a footnote.
The environmental assessment says the recycled wastewater mixed with stabilization material would be placed into 55-gallon drums and shipped by truck to the final disposal facility.
