The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says continued storage of potentially-combustible transuranic waste at Waste Control Specialists in Andrews County, Texas until Dec, 31, 2024, should not result in a significant environmental impact, but Texas wants to see the drums gone pronto.
In a May 10 letter to Assistant Secretary of Energy David Turk, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality Director Toby Baker said DOE needed to get serious about moving the drums by this week (May 31) or the state “will initiate additional enforcement actions against the DOE.”
While NRC has approved an extension, the current Texas approval expired May 31, although Waste Control Specialists has an application pending, said a Texas commission spokesperson.
Baker writes the state commission “has extended the deadline in Waste Control Specialists’ radioactive materials license several times to provide the DOE with ample time to finalize a plan and to remove” the Los Alamos National Laboratory transuranic (TRU) waste.
Meanwhile, DOE said Wednesday it recently approved Waste Control Specialists (WCS) plans to license and install a “radiological control enclosure” that could ultimately be used for preparation of the waste containers for shipment.
Shipment would occur once regulators are satisfied the waste is safe for transportation and offsite disposition, a DOE spokesperson said via email. “DOE is nearing the completion of the analytical work necessary for determining the framework for safely removing the remaining LANL [Los Alamos National Laboratory] TRU waste.”
Baker said in his letter to Turk that a DOE plan submitted to the commission in April still lacks firm timetables for removing the remaining waste.
For its part, Waste Control Specialists urged the DOE Office of Environmental Management as recently as last month for a firmer commitment and timetable for moving the stranded waste off its site.
“WCS is concerned that the patience of TCEQ [Texas Commission on Environmental Quality] will be exhausted absent a greater commitment by DOE to establish date certain milestones as repeatedly requested by the agency, and as most recently committed to by DOE in a March 31, 2020 letter,” WCS President David Carson said in a May 19 letter to DOE.
Copies of both the WCS and Texas letter were provided to Weapons Complex Monitor by TCEQ.
The May 27 finding of no significant impact in the Federal Register clears the way for continued stopgap storage of up to 74 remaining containers that came from Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2014. The drums ended up at Waste Control Specialists after an overheated Los Alamos drum caused an underground radiation leak at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico in February 2014.
WIPP would stay offline for about three years. Although most Los Alamos drums have moved to WIPP from WCS since 2017, others remain while the feds figure out if they can be shipped safely. Last year DOE completed removal of all the TRU waste containers previously stored above ground at WCS and disposed of them at WIPP, the DOE spokesperson said. The public website for WIPP indicated a shipment of drums from Waste Control Specialists was received at WIPP in February 2021.
Roughly a year ago, DOE extended a WCS contract for continued interim storage of the problematic waste. The current $22-million agreement between DOE and Waste Control Specialists pays the private company for keeping the waste into September 2024, according to an online procurement document.
In April 2021, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality reluctantly approved a minor amendment to the WCS state radioactive material license, allowing the drums to stay put in Andrews County until 2022, a move that came a few months after the NRC’s blessing of the December 2022 date.
In November 2019, Texas told DOE it has grown tired of keeping the Los Alamos transuranic waste containers and said it wanted DOE to move them out-of-state by December 2020. William (Ike) White, senior adviser for DOE’s Environmental Management office replied his agency is serious about moving the waste. But by September 2020, White acknowledged the technical challenges posed by the drums together with the COVID-19 pandemic, would further delay the relocation effort.
