Leaving 110 stranded drums of potentially combustible transuranic waste from the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory at a commercial waste facility in Texas for two more years poses no significant risk, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Tuesday.
The commission issued its finding Tuesday in the Federal Register, responding to an August request from Waste Control Specialists (WCS), which sought permission to extend the commission’s exemption for special nuclear materials rules for the drums through Dec. 23, 2022. The exemption will otherwise expire in three weeks.
The finding of no significant impact is necessary before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission can issue an additional two-year extension letter to WCS. Once the federal regulator issues the letter, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality will make its own assessment of whether to grant an additional two-year extension to WCS as it has in the past.
Waste Control Specialists declined comment.
The containers have been stranded at WCS since early 2014, when a drum containing similarly packaged waste combusted underground and leaked radiation into DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), shutting down that transuranic waste repository for about three years. Texas officials wanted the drums moved out of WCS by the end of 2020, but DOE’s Office of Environmental Management acknowledged in September that it couldn’t meet that timetable, in part because of COVID-19.
“DOE has yet to provide a formal plan,” Brian McGovern, a spokesman for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, said Tuesday by email. “Therefore, we can’t speculate on the removal schedule DOE may propose. We communicate regularly with DOE on this issue.”
The DOE “remains fully committed to safely removing the remaining transuranic (TRU) waste” as soon as possible, an Office of Environmental Management spokesman said in a Wednesday morning email. “In the interim, the waste continues to be stored in a safe configuration at WCS,” the spokesman said.
About 80% of the several hundred drums that went to the Texas site in 2014 have already been found safe and shipped on to WIPP for disposal. The remaining drums at WCS contain waste from the same waste stream as the barrel that burst open at WIPP in February 2014 and could be at risk of combustion, DOE has said.
After allowing the drums of transuranic waste to stay with WCS since the spring of 2014, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality informed the DOE Office of Environmental Management in November 2019 that it wanted the 110 remaining drums gone by the end of 2020. In January, William “Ike” White, DOE senior adviser for environmental management, said in January the cleanup office could start moving the drums this year. White backed off that statement after the COVID-19 pandemic ran roughshod across the country and the DOE nuclear weapons complex: an event unprecedented in the nuclear age.
