The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management acknowledged late Friday afternoon it will not remove remaining stranded drums of potentially-combustible transuranic waste from temporary storage in Andrews County, Texas this year.
“Due to the unique technical considerations” of removing the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) TRU from Waste Control Specialists, “as well as still-to-be-determined impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic … DOE will not be able to meet the Texas request to have the drums removed from WCS before the end of 2020,” an agency spokesperson said via email.
However, DOE “remains fully committed to safely removing” the remaining drums from temporary storage at the privately held waste disposal site, the spokesperson added.
The news is not a surprise. Last month WCS filed a request with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), seeking that agency’s approval to keep the waste for up to two additional years, through Dec. 23, 2022. Prior orders from both NRC and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (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.
About 110 drums remain from a larger tranche that arrived at WCS in April 2014, two months after an improperly packaged waste drum from LANL burst open underground at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., and caused a radiological leak that shuttered the facility for nearly three years. WIPP is the agency’s only deep underground disposal site for transuranic waste: material and equipment contaminated by elements heavier than uranium.
Most of the original tranche sent to WCS has since shipped to WIPP, but some drums stayed at the Texas site after DOE learned they shared similar combustibility risks as the LANL drum that burst underground.
In November 2019, 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.
“We are going to do our best” to remove the legacy TRU from Texas by the end of 2020, DOE Senior Advisor William (Ike) White said during an early February presentation to the Energy Communities Alliance in Washington, D.C.
But a month or so after White speech, Americans would quickly become familiar with the terms: “coronavirus” or “COVID-19.” By mid-March the Energy Department dramatically scaled back operations at its nuclear cleanup sites, and full staffing has yet to be restored to pre-pandemic levels.
