A New Mexico hearing officer has endorsed the Energy Department’s request to revise how transuranic waste “volume” is calculated at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) under the 1992 WIPP Land Withdrawal Act.
The Dec. 10 report by state Hearing Officer Max Shepherd is now before New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) Secretary Butch Tongate, who can accept, change, or disregard the recommendations.
The Energy Department has requested a revision to its state hazardous waste permit under which the volume of waste counted against the Land Withdrawal Act cap should cover only the actual material inside containers, rather than counting empty spaces or packing material inside a larger container. The hearing officer “found no evidence” suggesting the law intended WIPP to measure volume based on the size of the disposal container.
Congress decided the underground facility should hold 6.2 million cubic feet of TRU defense waste, encompassing 850,000 drums each with a 55-gallon capacity. Just because “many of those drums were not fully packed,” it seems illogical that Congress would want emplacement to stop before the cap on actual waste had been reached, Shepherd said.
The hearing officer recommended waste at WIPP be counted two ways going forward. It should continue to be measured by the volume of the “outermost container” placed into the underground for purposes of the Resource Recovery and Conservation Act (RCRA). But when it comes to the Land Withdrawal Act, what matters will be actual volume of waste, not including void spaces or packing material.
The hearing officer agreed with DOE, and WIPP contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership, that the revised method should be applied retroactively, which would cut its current waste volume figure by about 30 percent from its current level.
Shepherd largely adopted DOE’s position on its request to the state, said Scott Kovac, operations and research director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, one of the parties to the NMED proceeding. Kovac said he believes the current administration of Gov. Susana Martinez (R) is rushing out a decision before the new governor, Democrat Michelle Lujan Grisham, takes office in January.
WIPP Readies for First Shipment of Argonne Waste
The contractor for WIPP expects within days to take a shipment of remote-handled waste from the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, which has a higher radiation dose than most shipments over the past nearly two years.
The Argonne shipment will be one of the last WIPP takes this year prior to a three-week maintenance outage from Jan. 7 through Jan. 27, noted Bruce Covert, president and project manager for Nuclear Waste Partnership. Waste emplacement is not done during the annual maintenance outage at the transuranic waste disposal facility.
The maintenance outage will allow for work on electric substations, underground air line replacement, and upkeep on the salt hoist.
Covert mentioned the upcoming shipment during a WIPP Town Hall meeting Dec. 13. He said the Argonne shipment wasvexpected within the next week.
The Energy Department said in September it plans to take the remote-handled TRU waste. Contact-handled TRU has a surface radiation dose of less than 200 millirem per hour, while remote-handled waste is 200 millirem or more. Covert stressed the remote-handled waste will be transported in a “shielded container.”
The underground disposal site last took a shipment from Argonne in 2013. The Energy Department has said it expects to receive five shipments from the lab by mid-2019.
Since it resumed taking off-site TRU waste in early 2017, WIPP has received 424 shipments from the Idaho National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, and Waste Control Specialists in Texas. The facility was shut down for about three years after a February 2014 underground radiation leak.
