Transuranic waste from the Savannah River Site (SRS) will not be certified for shipment to New Mexico for permanent disposal until at least March, the top Department of Energy official at the South Carolina facility told a citizens group this week.
Earlier this year, DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office released stricter new standards for packaging and shipping radioactively contaminated material and equipment known as transuranic waste to the underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. — the only disposal facility for such material in the country.
Any DOE defense nuclear site that creates, or has in the past created, transuranic waste must certify its shipping and handling methods comply with these new standards, which are known officially as waste acceptance criteria.
“The SRS recertification is scheduled to begin in March 2017,” Jack Craig, DOE’s site manager for SRS, said Tuesday in prepared remarks to the agency-chartered SRS Citizens Advisory Board.
Depending on how long the certification process takes to complete, that would put SRS on track to resume shipping transuranic around the same time WIPP is projected to start accepting such material again; the deep underground salt mine has been closed to shipments since February 2014, following an accidental radiation release and unrelated underground fire that month.
According to timelines the agency and prime WIPP contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership have provided in public over the summer, the mine should be ready to accept new waste shipments by April. However, DOE has not yet said which sites will be first in the queue to send their waste to WIPP.
Craig on Tuesday said some transuranic waste recertification efforts are already well under way across the DOE complex. The SRS boss aid personnel from his site had been sent to observe recertification programs at the Oak Ridge site in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and at the Idaho site near Idaho Falls, Idaho.
Kirsten Ellis, acting director of the DOE Environmental Management office’s communications office, did not reply to a Thursday questions about when the Oak Ridge and Idaho recertification programs began, whether they ended, and how many more DOE sites had yet to be re-certified to send transuranic waste to WIPP.
In early September, Todd Shrader, manager of DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, told Weapons Complex Monitor the agency hoped to recertify transuranic waste programs across the complex by the time the mine reopens for new shipments some time next year. Schedules the agency and its contractors have laid out publicly suggest the mine will begin accepting shipments from other DOE sites by April.
Shrader has also said he does not expect massive amounts of transuric waste packaged at DOE sites in accordance with the previous WIPP waste acceptance criteria will have to be unpackaged and repacked to achieve compliance with the new standard.
