The state of New York plans to accept public input later this year on a draft permit for the U.S. Department of Energy to keep transuranic waste up to 10 years at the Separations Process Research Unit (SPRU) cleanup site in Schenectady County.
After the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) last year decided the material should no longer be held under series of 30-day agreements, DOE requested a hazardous waste permit for TRU storage.
Changes to the application were filed by DOE in late December, a DEC spokesman said Wednesday.
Once a draft permit is issued the state will announce a 45-day public comment period, which would probably occur in the second quarter, the spokesman said.
The mixed transuranic waste is being stored under an administrative order on consent (AOC), issued a year ago, until the permit is issued. The AOC replaced a series of 30-day storage extensions.
The waste at issue was generated in 2015 and 2016 from demolition of SPRU’s H2 and G2 buildings. The federal agency has two TRU waste containers and 22 containers of mixed TRU waste stored in five Conex boxes, a type of shipping container. Both hazardous and radioactive materials are in the mixed waste, according to DEC.
Eventually, the transuranic waste could be shipped to DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico by 2025.
Cleanup contractor URS Corp., an AECOM subsidiary, finished tearing down buildings and removed all concrete debris last fall. The Energy Department said this week it expects site restoration and backfilling to be completed this summer. AECOM’s $146 million completion contract, which started in December 2007 while URS was a stand-alone company, is scheduled to end in March.
Located at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, SPRU’s mission in 1950 through 1953 was to research the chemical process to extract plutonium from radioactive materials.
