Staff Reports
WC Monitor
12/11/2015
A Department of Energy official confirmed that the transition of contractors at the Transuranic Waste Processing Center at Oak Ridge would be completed this week, with North Wind Solutions officially taking over responsibility for management and operations at 6 a.m. Friday.
North Wind received the $123.9 million contract – with a three-year base and a two-year option – in June, but the transition of contractors did not begin until mid-October because three of the other bidders protested the award. Those protests were either dropped or eventually denied by the Government Accountability Office.
Sue Cange, the DOE environmental manager in Oak Ridge, planned to visit the waste-processing facility on Wednesday, along with Mark Whitney, DOE’s principal deputy assistant secretary for environmental management, and others to recognize Wastren Advantage for its work over the past five years and to welcome officials from Idaho-based North Wind – which has been working previously as a subcontractor to WAI at the facility charged with treating TRU waste from Oak Ridge operations.
“We’re going to thank WAI for their service and their contributions to completing our transuranic waste processing mission and welcome North Wind as our new contractor to come on board and complete the processing of the debris material sometime in the next approximately three years or so,” Cange said.
Whitney was a keynote speaker Wednesday at the opening session of the Energy, Technology, and Environmental Business Association’s annual Business Opportunities Conference in Knoxville, and he reaffirmed that the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant will not resume waste operations in March 2016 – as previously targeted by DOE and its contractor at the New Mexico repository. Whitney indicated DOE still hopes to restart WIPP sometime in 2016.
The shutdown of operations at WIPP since February 2014 has put pressure on some DOE sites that had planned their operations based on regular TRU waste shipments to the Carlsbad, N.M., facility.
Asked how Oak Ridge was impacted by the delayed reopening of WIPP, Cange said, “We’re in a fortunate position in that we have storage capacity at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. So we are able to continue to process the waste, and the Central Characterization Project from Carlsbad is here certifying the waste.”
However, in order to accommodate the delays and keep the wastes on site, DOE’s Oak Ridge team had to come up with some new containers for storage of the hottest solid wastes. The long-lived radioactive materials are known as remote-handled transuranic waste. “Because we can’t ship it directly to WIPP and have to put it in storage, we have to make sure we have proper storage containers for that high-activity material,” Cange said.
She said DOE didn’t previously have those kinds of containers. In fact, the department official said, nobody did. “So, we have designed and manufactured first-of-a-kind storage containers of this type that are being utilized to store the processed remote-handled debris material,” Cange said.
There were no details immediately available on how many containers were manufactured in recent months, who did the work, or how much they cost.
After workers process wastes at the Oak Ridge plant, both remote-handled and contact-handled material, the wastes are certified for shipment to WIPP by the CCP team at the site and placed in storage. Asked if the wastes would have to be recertified if they remain in storage for an indefinite period, Cange responded, “The only scenario that I can think of where we might have to recertify is if the certification requirements themselves change. So, by virtue of them sitting in storage, there will not be (a reason to re-certify them for shipment to WIPP). But if certification requirements change, then we may have to do some additional work.
“However, that was a risk I was willing to take because it’s important that we continue with our waste-processing campaign and not have delays in our processing of material,” she said.
