WASHINGTON, D.C. — Under pressure from the state of Texas, the Energy Department’s nuclear cleanup office has agreed to relocate drums containing potentially combustible radioactive transuranic waste stored since 2014 at the privately operated Waste Control Specialists facility in Andrews County.
“We are going to work to disposition the legacy TRU waste from Los Alamos [National Laboratory in New Mexico] that we currently have stored at WCS in Texas and meet the commitments we have made to the state there,” Energy Department Senior Adviser for Environmental Management Ike White said Friday during a presentation to the Energy Communities Alliance (ECA) annual meeting.
“The state of Texas has asked us to get that waste moved …. by the end of this calendar year,” White said. “We are going to do our best.”
The top official at DOE’s Office of Environmental Management did not say when the relocation might begin.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) told then-Deputy Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette in writing on Nov. 26 the state is no longer willing to keep the drums beyond this year while DOE performs additional environmental studies – on issues such as whether to treat the drums onsite before they are moved to WIPP or another Energy Department location. The “continued status quo of meetings and studies is untenable,” according to the Texas letter.
The letter to Brouillette, who in December succeeded Rick Perry as energy secretary, gives DOE’s cleanup office until March 31 to file a plan detailing a schedule for moving the waste out of Texas by Dec. 23, 2020. Texas has yet to receive the DOE plan, TCEQ spokesman Brian McGovern said in a Monday email.
The drums have been at WCS since April 2014, about two months after a radiological leak underground halted operations at the DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. Waste Control Specialists agreed to temporarily store WIPP-bound drums from Los Alamos. But the drums became stranded after it was learned some of the Los Alamos drums held the same incorrectly remediated nitrate salts mixture as the one that overheated and caused the underground radioactive leak at WIPP.
Texas and DOE initially agreed to a one-year storage limit at WCS, and the state eventually approved a pair of two-year extensions requested by the federal agency. The latest extension expires this December. Since WIPP resumed taking waste shipments in April 2014, DOE has removed more than 80% of the original 582 drums because they were not deemed a combustion risk.
There remain about 113 drums of Los Alamos TRU waste at the Andrews County that share corrosion traits with the drum that overheated.
