The New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) wants to know more about the Energy Department’s proposal to change the way it counts the volume of transuranic waste emplaced at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
In a June 27 letter, called a technical incompleteness determination, the state agency asked DOE and WIPP management contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) to answer a number of questions by July 30, including how the volume calculations would be conducted and where they would be reported.
In February, DOE and the contractor asked the state for a site permit modification that would allow them to forgo counting the empty space between drums inside a waste container in their disposal volume calculations. That would officially reduce the volume of waste now at the underground min by about 30 percent under the 1992 WIPP Land Withdrawal Act, according to Todd Shrader, manager of DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, which oversees WIPP. The Energy Department believes the act was meant to count actual waste, and not empty space, Shrader recently told a National Academies panel in California.
New Mexico said June 1 the change would be treated as a Class 3 permit modification, which requires a more extensive review and the opportunity for a public hearing. The DOE had filed its request as a Class 2 modification. Shrader believes the Class 3 process could take another year.
Among other things, the state wants details on how the volume calculation process would be regulated. “Please provide details of DOE’s plan or mechanism to track and report waste volumes pursuant to the [Land Withdrawal Act]. Please clarify if DOE will use fill factor or inner container volumes,” John Kieling, head of NMED’s Hazardous Waste Bureau, wrote in the letter to Shrader and NWP President and Project Manager Bruce Covert.
The letter also asks what type of access the public will have to WIPP’s waste volume tracking results.
