In a long-awaited report published this week, the Department of Energy estimated it could save up to $230 billion by lowering the classification level of certain radioactive waste from nuclear-weapons production — and while some neighbors of nuclear-cleanup sites welcomed the idea, it remained far from certain that Congress will give the agency clear legal authority to make such a big change.
Following Wednesday’s riot in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, congressional representatives of states with major DOE cleanup and disposal sites did not immediately reply to requests for comment about DOE’s 44-page report, which the agency delivered to the Hill in December before sharing it online this week.
The New Mexico delegation’s opinion looms large because DOE believes it could safely reclassify some high-level waste — only waste generated by reprocessing nuclear fuel for defense missions — as transuranic waste. The agency has disposed of transuranic waste for years at its Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M.
DOE has also socked away some transuranic waste at the commercially operated Waste Control Specialists site in west Texas, though that tranche was not the type of waste studied in the reclassification report, and DOE mostly uses the commercial site as a waystation between the Los Alamos National Laboratory and WIPP. As a pilot proof-of-concept in 2020, the agency sent some eight gallons of reclassified waste, stabilized wastewater grout, to the Waste Control Specialists facility from the Savannah River Site.
Though lawmakers were overwhelmed this week, no less a voice than the Government Accountability Office urged Congress to consider clarifying DOE’s legal authorities over high-level waste, at least with respect to the Hanford Site in Washington state.
On Thursday, the Government Accountability Office said Congress could debate whether residual waste from the former plutonium production complex’s underground tanks might, with Nuclear Regulatory Commission involvement, be managed as a waste type other than high-level waste.
Most of the $230 billion in savings from reclassifying eligible high-level waste, between roughly $70 billion and $200 billion, would come from reclassifying low-activity liquid waste at Hanford’s West Area tank site, according to DOE’s report. Hanford’s Waste Treatment Plant, slated to start turning low-activity waste into glass within a couple of years, will not be able to process all 54 million gallons of tank waste at Hanford, and grout is being studied as one of the options for whatever the plant cannot process, according to DOE’s report.
Right now, reclassification at Hanford is a legal no-go. DOE may not apply its high-level waste interpretation to any waste in Washington state, Randy Bradbury, a spokesperson for the Washington Department of Ecology, said in an email this week.
Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette wrote in an introduction to the high-level waste report that the paper is for “informational purposes only” and does not propose any specific plan of action.
Meanwhile, although the usual chorus of anti-nuclear watchdogs near EM sites were quick to spurn DOE’s report, other site neighbors thought the agency’s ideas had merit.
The billions of dollars in potential savings and quicker path to final disposal should get serious consideration from Congress and the incoming Joe Biden administration, Rick McLeod, president and CEO of the Savannah River Site Community Reuse Organization in Aiken, S.C., told Weapons Complex Monitor by phone this week.
Likewise, the Energy Communities Alliance, the Washington-based interest group for DOE host locales, cheered the report all week and trumpeted the potential savings. The group’s own 2017 report pushed for a new DOE approach to waste management and extolled the financial benefits. The alliance subsequently pushed hard for a closer, official look at the reclassification issue: something Congress ordered in the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act signed into law in 2017, early in President Donald Trump’s term.
But anti-nuclear citizen groups near the sites expressed much skepticism on the value of the report during the eleventh hour of the Trump administration, saying that DOE is only pushing to codify its June 2019 interpretation that some material currently classified as high-level waste is not actually quite so hazardous.
“Given the numerous flaws with the document and its many improper assumptions, it’s clear why it has been delivered almost three years late,” Tom Clements, executive director of the Savannah River Watch in South Carolina said in an email.
“DOE is engaged in a shell game to simply redefine terms to escape the legal (and moral) requirements to safeguard some of the most long-lived and toxic materials known to humankind, and in our view it is unconscionable as well as contrary to law,” said Tom Carpenter, executive director of the Hanford Challenge environmental group in Washington.
“Rather than using this report, my organization and others will continue to request that the new administration revoke the DOE [high-level waste] interpretation of June 10, 2019,” Don Hancock, nuclear safety administrator with the New Mexico-based Southwest Research and Information Center, said in a Thursday email.
Rather than reclassifying high-level waste, Hancock said his group and other nuclear watch dogs prefer use of more double-shell tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state along with developing underground geologic sites in lieu of the stalled Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada.
DOE’s aim with its 2019 intepreration was to show that some high-level waste could be disposed of cheaper, and at existing low-level or transuranic waste sites. As Paul Dabbar, DOE’s undersecretary for science, said at the time, “going forward, the key question will be “how radioactive it is.”
Disposal Options and Industry
Other than the pilot program with Waste Control Specialists, DOE had not at the time of this writing sent any reclassified reprocessing waste to a commercial site nor announced plans to do so. Waste Control Specialists declined comment about DOE’s reclassification report, or the business prospects that might accompany reclassification.
Utah-based EnergySolutions viewed DOE’s reclassification report as a positive development.
“The DOE’s reclassification of [high-level waste] allows the department to evaluate alternative options for cost effective waste management going forward,” spokesman Mark Walker said in a Friday email.
Currently, EnergySolutions will continue to work with DOE “for safe and compliant disposal of Class A Low-Level Radioactive Waste that complies with our Radioactive Material License,” Walker said.
As for WIPP, DOE would need to change its agreement with host state New Mexico to alter the facility and its disposal rules to accept some potentially reclassifiable waste, according to the agency’s report. New Mexico has been holding out on changes to the WIPP agreement, seeking further infrastructure investment and other guarantees from DOE.
Candidate Reclassification Waste Outside Hanford
Other than the low-activity waste at Hanford, DOE identified candidate waste tranches for reclassification at the Idaho National Laboratory — solid, granular sodium-bearing waste — and the Savannah River Site — vitrified waste — which if reclassified could save as much as $15 billion and $5 billion, respectively.
The agency had not approached the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality with a proposal to alter existing treatment plans at the Idaho lab, said Brian English, hazardous waste permits supervisor for the state. Much of the current plan involves commissioning the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit to convert sodium bearing waste into a more stable form for disposal.
At Savannah River, DOE is looking at alternate methods of disposal of about 380,000 gallons of recycled wastewater from the Defense Waste Processing Facility, according to the high-level waste report. The state’s Department Health and Environmental Control did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
