While the Energy Department faces a December deadline to remove some problem transuranic waste from a commercial disposal site in West Texas, there appears to be a chance the material might stay there for two more years.
On Aug. 24, Waste Control Specialists requested the Nuclear Regulatory Commission relax its existing order that allows the drums to stay at WCS until late December. It hopes the federal agency will allow potentially combustible drums of TRU waste from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to stay at the company facility in Andrews County through Dec. 23, 2022.
The NRC expects to complete a safety and environmental review and respond to the Waste Control Specialists request by Oct. 30.
There remains, however, an existing Texas order that says the drums must go by Christmas. Under pressure from state officials to remove the waste, which has been stuck at WCS since 2014, Senior DOE Adviser for Environmental Management William (Ike) White said in February that “We are going to do our best” to remove the drums this year. However, that was at the beginning of what has become a nationwide COVID-19 pandemic.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) in November 2019 told then-Deputy Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette the state has tired keeping the waste while DOE performs additional environmental reviews on whether the drums might overheat and rupture – similar to what happened to another LANL drum underground at the DOE Waste Isolation Power Plant in February 2014.
The TCEQ’s deadline for the waste to be removed is Dec. 23, spokesman Brian McGovern said by email Wednesday. “We are still awaiting a final plan from DOE describing how and when the waste will be removed from Texas,” he said.
The Energy Department did not comment on the current status of the stranded Los Alamos Waste by deadline Friday.
The roughly 110 drums have been at the private disposal site since April 2014, about two months after a radiological leak underground halted operations at the WIPP facility near Carlsbad, N.M. Waste Control Specialists agreed to temporarily keep WIPP-bound drums from Los Alamos. But some drums became stranded after it was determined they held the same incorrectly remediated nitrate salts mixture as the vessel that overheated and caused the underground radioactive leak at WIPP.
They have remained in Texas under a series of short-term orders by NRC and the state. About 80% of the drums sent from Los Alamos to Waste Control Specialists in 2014 have over time been deemed safe and transported onto WIPP.
