The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission this week cleared the way for the Department of Energy to ship radio-contaminated barrels that qualify as transuranic waste from the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico.
WIPP has been closed to new shipments of transuranic waste since an accidental radiation release and unrelated underground fire in 2014, so NRC’s move does not mean the SRS waste is headed to New Mexico anytime soon.
NRC found no significant impact of giving Nuclear Waste Partnership, DOE’s WIPP prime contractor, one-time permission to ship the contaminated material in a container that isn’t as watertight as federal regulations ordinarily require, according to the results of an environmental assessment NRC posted online in the Federal Register on Thursday.
DOE and Nuclear Waste Partnership aim to reopen WIPP on Dec. 12, agency and company officials said Thursday.
The waste will be shipped in two standardized containers known as SLB2 waste boxes. Each box contains “primarily one half of a decommissioned tank used to process Plutonium-238,” NRC wrote in its notice.
Plutonium-238 is a relatively short-lived isotope used, among other things, to power robots that cannot rely on traditional batteries or solar power. Among these are military bomb-defusal rovers and uncrewed spacecraft.
