The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has still received no definitive timetable from the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management for removing stranded drums of potentially-combustible transuranic waste from temporary commercial storage in Andrews County, a commission spokesperson said this week.
The state regulator expected to receive a technical analysis from the Environmental Management office in April about the two most viable options for removing the roughly 110 waste drums, but DOE had not delivered that analysis as of Wednesday, Brian McGovern, a spokesperson for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), told Weapons Complex Monitor.
“We have been engaged in ongoing discussions with DOE, but have not received a formal letter from DOE,” McGovern said. The state expects to get such a letter soon, McGovern told the Monitor.
Last week, the DOE Environmental Management confirmed to the Monitor that it will not remove the stranded LANL TRU waste from the Waste Control Specialists site in 2020 “due to the unique technical considerations” of removing it “as well as still-to-be-determined impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Transuranic (TRU) waste is material and equipment contaminated by elements heavier than uranium. The barrels of it stored since 2014 at privately owned Waste Control Specialists’ (WCS) main radwaste site came from the Los Alamos National Laboratory some 420 miles up the road. The waste is similar to the batch that burst open underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in 2014, closing the DOE-owned deep-underground disposal site for about three years.
The technical analysis TCEQ is waiting for is DOE’s way of picking between one of two options it identified in late March for getting the TRU waste out of Texas: confirm the material can be safely shipped straight to WIPP, or send it back to Los Alamos for more treatment. If the waste has to go back to Los Alamos, that would trigger a review under the National Environmental Policy Act, and removal would not be completed until 2022, DOE said.
In November, TCEQ told the Energy Department it was no longer willing to hang onto the TRU waste indefinitely and wanted the stuff out of Texas by Dec. 23, 2020. Earlier this year, DOE’s Environmental Management office said removing all the material by this Christmas was a longshot, and that some of it might remain at WCS until April 2022.
WCS is hedging for that possibility.
In August, the company filed a request with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the commercial nuclear regulator, seeking that agency’s approval to store the waste for up to two more years, through Dec. 23, 2022. Current orders from both NRC and TCEQ allow drums to stay at WCS until Dec. 23 of this year. The NRC expects to do a safety review and get back to the company by Oct. 30.
That review would be very similar to safety and environmental reviews the federal regulator did in 2018, when WCS needed its last a two-year extension to continue storing the DOE’s waste, NRC spokesman David McIntye wrote in an email.
About 110 containers of Los Alamos TRU waste remain at WCS from a larger tranche sent there in April 2014, two months after the accident at WIPP, near Carlsbad, N.M.
Of the containers of Los Alamos TRU waste sent to WCS, more have shipped out than remain. Some 320 containers of the original group sent to the company have since been deemed safe and sent to WIPP. Others remained in Texas, because they shared similar combustibility risks as the drum that burst underground.
Originally the drums were to stay at WCS no more than a year. Texas and the NRC have agreed to a series of one or two-year extensions to the arrangement since then.
Research by the Los Alamos and the Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina suggests the TRU at WCS has become less susceptible to ignition over time, according to the March EM document. If that is the case then DOE could route the containers straight to WIPP — and the process could conclude in the first quarter of 2021.
