The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) has authorized Waste Control Specialists (WCS) to store radioactive waste from the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory for an additional two years, to nearly the end of 2018.
The decision is one of a long list of updates to the company’s state radioactive material license approved on Oct. 5. It aligns the state timeline for storage of the Los Alamos waste at WCS’ disposal complex in West Texas with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s corresponding extension last year for the company.
The WCS license “has been modified to reflect the changes by the NRC on the Order to WCS regarding possession and storage of special nuclear material,” according to a technical summary of the TCEQ “minor amendment.” “The time that the license is allowed to possess the LANL waste has been changed from a maximum of 2 years to 4 years with the date changed from December 23, 2016 to December 23, 2018.”
The license amendment process, which Waste Control Specialists initiated in October 2016, was not free of friction between the parties. In an email sent on June 6 of this year, TCEQ Office of Waste Radioactive Materials Division Director Charles Maguire upbraided then-WCS Vice President for Licensing and Corporate Compliance Michael Ford regarding the lines of communication between the company and state agency.
“Direct contact with the Division needs to be thru [WCS President and CEO Rod Baltzer or Vice President of Government Affairs Betsy Madru] to me only,” Maguire wrote in his message, which Weapons Complex Monitor obtained through a public information request. “Please refrain from unsolicited contact with staff to work out changes to licensing strategies and plans.”
Ford responded on June 7 with an apology, but noted in an extended message to Maguire that his contact with the state regulator’s staff had not been unsolicited: “I was carrying out a decision of WCS management in response to a 30 May TCEQ staff query.”
Maguire appeared to resolve the matter later that day in a brief message to Ford, Baltzer, Madru, and Bobby Janecka, manager of the TCEQ division’s Radioactive Materials Section: “Hopefully it will not happen again.”
“The Radioactive Materials Division’s protocol, established by Mr. Maguire long before Mr. Ford’s involvement, is that WCS communicate directly with Mr. Maguire concerning strategies for amendments,” TCEQ spokesman Brian McGovern said by email Thursday. “WCS’s designees for that level of communication are Mr. Baltzer and Ms. Madru, WCS’s Vice President of Governmental Affairs.”
Waste Control Specialists declined to comment on the matter Thursday.
The Dallas company operates a storage complex in Andrews County, Texas, near the border with New Mexico, for disposal of low-level radioactive waste and other waste forms.
In 2014, it received between 300 and 400 drums of transuranic waste from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico. Under normal circumstances the material would have gone to DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., but the underground disposal facility was closed following the February 2014 release of radiation from a container that originated at Los Alamos.
After a nearly three-year shutdown, WIPP reopened to waste shipments from other DOE sites in April 2017, but its long closure required state and federal regulators to relax the deadline for Waste Control Specialists to ship its LANL waste back across the border “to allow compliant and safe storage of such waste until a final disposition plan is approved and can be implemented,” according to the NRC order from Sept. 23, 2016.
The company in September received a $19.3 million task order from the Energy Department for ongoing storage of the LANL waste. The tasking has a two-year base with two follow-on options for, respectively one year and 100 days.
As of this week, Waste Control Specialists had reportedly sent nearly 20 shipments of the Los Alamos waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
However, just over 110 of the Los Alamos-origin barrels contain improperly remediated nitrate salts like the mix behind the radiation incident at WIPP. That waste must undergo some form of treatment before being shipped. In September, DOE officials said a study on processing that waste should in early 2018 be delivered to headquarters for review. There was no immediate update this week.
Rail Tipper Building Planned
Other updates in the state amendment to Waste Control Specialists’ radioactive materials license are intended to enable the company to build and operate a Rail Tipper Building at its facility.
The Rail Tipper Building would be used for “potential decommissioning projects in the future,” WCS spokesman Chuck McDonald said by email, without discussion details of the future projects.
However, industry observers have seen waste from the increasing number of U.S. nuclear power plants being decommissioned as an opportunity for Waste Control Specialists, a Valhi Inc. subsidiary that has struggled with millions of dollars in losses and in June was blocked by a federal judge from merging with rival EnergySolutions, of Salt Lake City. Valhi has been searching for a new buyer for WCS, but a deal has not yet materialized.
One new sub-condition to the state license authorizes the Rail Tipper Building to conduct operations including unloading of Class A radioactive waste in bulk, cleanup and decontamination of waste transport vehicles, and transfer of the waste from railcars to trucks for transport to disposal at one of the company’s facilities.
The Rail Tipper Building cannot initiate operations until TCEQ has signed off on a rail tipper operations procedure with “applicable radiation safety procedures,” according to the license.
McDonald said he could not discuss the schedule for Waste Control Specialists to submit the procedure to the state or begin operations at the Rail Tipper Building.
