Crews at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site plan next week to open up a contaminated waste box recently returned to South Carolina from the agency’s underground disposal site in New Mexico, a federal advisory board heard Tuesday.
“We are spending a lot of time planning it out to make sure we get it done correctly,” Kerri Crawford, solid waste program manager for prime contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, told the Savannah River Citizens Advisory Board. Decontamination must occur before the problem waste is allowed back to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), she added.
To prepare to unload, evaluate and decontaminate the standard waste box of transuranic waste container that returned to Savannah River on Aug. 24, site workers in July received an empty HalfPACT container to use for practice.
The contaminated HalfPACT, generated at Savannah River more than a decade ago, had sat in a WIPP parking lot for about a year before it was returned to South Carolina last month. WIPP managers received special Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval for the return trip because the package’s maintenance certification had expired.
The container WIPP rejected holds “empty drums that were grossly contaminated,” and shipped as transuranic waste to WIPP, Crawford said to a question from the advisory panel. The drums were “mummified” or wrapped in plastic inside the waste box, she said.
No contamination was found before the box was sent to WIPP in August 2022, Crawford said. She added any signs of contamination at Savannah River would have halted the shipment. But in September 2022, crews at WIPP detected a “small amount of contamination” inside the HalfPACT’s inner containment vessel, according to Crawford’s slide presentation.
“WIPP is not set up to manage contamination,” so it was necessary for the box to be returned to Savannah River, Crawford said.
“We are doing this through a containment hut” equipped with high efficiency particulate air filters, Crawford said. A half-dozen workers wearing personal protective equipment are expected to be inside the hut, she said.
While some Savannah River Site shipments to WIPP continue, a legacy waste stream of about 60 containers is on hold “until we make this evaluation,” Crawford said.
The well-traveled waste box was first prepared at Savannah River per manufacturer instructions back in October 2012, Crawford said. That was about 15 months before a February 2014 underground radiation leak at WIPP shut down the disposal site for about three years.
