ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Transuranic waste has been piling up around the Energy Department’s nuclear complex since the only disposal site for such material closed in 2014, and it will continue to pile up in relative safety for at least a little while longer, senior DOE officials said here Thursday.
“We’re still looking at good space with storage capacity at the sites.” Frank Marcinowski, associate principal deputy secretary for regulatory and policy affairs for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, said here during a panel discussion at the 2016 National Cleanup Workshop. “But soon, that may be an issue at some point down the road.”
How soon, Marcinowski did not say. After being closed for more than two years due to an accidental radiation release and unrelated underground fire, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., is set to reopen in December or January, but not to accept new shipments of transuranic waste for months after that.
As of Dec. 31, 2014, there were nearly 55,000 cubic yards of contact-handled transuranic waste stored across eight sites in the agency’s 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 Annual Transuranic Waste Inventory Report. The bed of a small pickup truck holds roughly 1 cubic yard.
The deputy manager of the single largest transuranic waste pile in the DOE complex, located at the Idaho National Laboratory, said in a brief interview here that the WIPP situation was not a problem.
Asked whether he was concerned about running out of waste storage space, Jack Zimmerman, deputy manager of DOE’s Idaho Cleanup Project, said no.
“We’ve had discussions” with DOE’s National TRU Program, Zimmerman said. Waste stored above-ground at WIPP’s Waste Handling Building will be moved to the underground first. “Beyond that, decisions haven’t been made.”
Since WIPP began accepting waste shipments in 1999, Idaho has shipped some 27,000 containers of transuranic waste there, Zimmerman said in a panel discussion with other DOE and industry officials.
Marcinowski insisted here DOE has made no decisions about the queue for shipping waste to WIPP, once shipping waste to WIPP is an option.
However, last week in Las Vegas at the ExchangeMonitor’s 2016 RadWaste Summit, a contractor at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash., said that former plutonium production facility would be last.
“Hanford’s at the end of the shipping queue,” Connie Simiele, vice president of the nuclear waste and fuels management project for Hanford cleanup contractor CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co., said Sept. 8 during a question-and-answer session from the stage.
