Some transuranic waste that has already been packed up and prepared for shipment to the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) might have to be unpacked, inspected, and packed up again, according to new waste acceptance criteria slated to go into effect today at the underground mine near Carlsbad, N.M.
The announcement came along with a 123-page waste acceptance criteria document DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, which oversees WIPP, dropped last week.
“All previously certified waste containers not currently disposed at WIPP will need to be validated to ensure the revised requirements are met prior to shipment to WIPP,” the Carlsbad Field Office wrote in a note posted on its website. “Some wastes may need to be treated and repackaged prior to shipment to WIPP but it will take the Department several months to determine which, if any, wastes may be impacted.”
Still, DOE said, this audit of transuranic waste programs across the agency’s nuclear complex should not delay the scheduled Dec. 12 reopening of WIPP. The facility has been closed since 2014, after an accidental underground radiation release and unrelated underground fire. New waste shipments from across the complex are slated to begin in early 2017, DOE has said.
Another feature of the new WIPP waste acceptance criteria is tighter checks for potentially explosive chemicals in packed-up waste. An explosive combination of organic kitty litter and nitrate salts were blamed on the underground radiation release in 2014 that has kept WIPP shut down ever since. The chemical reaction that blew open a container deep underground was blamed on improper packaging by workers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Transuranic waste — radio-contaminated material and equipment produced by DOE during decades of U.S. nuclear weapons programs dating back to the Manhattan Project — is scattered throughout the DOE weapons complex. The department estimates about 1,000 drums of transuranic waste across the country already meet the stricter new standards for acceptance at WIPP.
But that is a small fraction of the total DOE transuranic waste inventory, according to the agency’s latest Annual Transuranic Waste Inventory Report.
There is nearly 55,000 cubic yards of contact-handled transuranic waste stored across eight sites in the DOE nuclear complex, plus almost another 5,000 cubic yards of the more dangerous, more radioactive remote-handled transuranic waste at 10 DOE nuclear sites, according to the 2015 report.
The tally in DOE’s annual report includes waste inventories at big-name sites such as the Hanford Site, near Richland, Wash., and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, but also smaller facilities such as the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory for nuclear naval propulsion development in Schenectady, N.Y. DOE’s public transuranic waste inventories include only waste intended for disposal at WIPP.
