Waste Control Specialists continues to study whether it should accept Greater-Than-Class C (GTCC) low-level radioactive waste for disposal from the Department of Energy, according to President and Chief Operating Officer David Carlson.
The Energy Department in 2018 identified the WCS disposal complex in Andrews County, Texas, as its likely end location for the national stockpile of GTCC and similar GTCC-like wastes. The next step toward disposal would be up to Congress, which has not taken any action.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is also still in the middle of a regulatory update that would help pave the way for disposal of the waste.
“We’re also evaluating disposal of GTCC since the Nuclear Regulatory Commission came out with a draft regulatory basis,” Carlson said during a June 9 session of the American Nuclear Society’s annual meeting, this year conducted solely online. “We’re at least going through that evaluation whether that’ll make sense for us to do.”
He did not discuss details of the evaluation, or when the company might need to decide one way or the other on accepting the waste. Waste Control Specialists, which has long struggled to turn a profit, has previously indicated it would be willing to take the new business.
The Dallas-based company would put the waste into its Federal Waste Facility, a spokesman said by email Monday. Management “is not providing further details beyond David Carlson’s comments at the meeting because the details you seek would require disclosure of strategic, proprietary business information,” he wrote.
Greater-Than Class C encompasses all low-level radioactive wastes with radionuclide concentrations above the limit for the federal Class C designation, which is the most hazardous among the three federal classes. It is largely comprised of activated metals, sealed sources, and other materials generated by government and commercial nuclear operations.
It is the Department of Energy’s job to permanently dispose of GTCC and GTCC-like wastes, which are projected to encompass 12,000 cubic meters of material by 2083. That waste for now remains held where it was generated or in interim storage around the United States. Federal regulations require disposal via geologic repository, though the Nuclear Regulatory Commission can rule on an alternate means of disposal. However, it has never received an application for such an option.
The two federal agencies have taken some steps in recent years toward resolving the impasse.
In a 2016 environmental impact statement, DOE identified its preferred means of disposal as generic commercial facilities and/or its Waste Isolation Pilot Plant transuranic waste disposal facility in New Mexico. The agency followed that up with a 2018 environmental assessment for sending all 12,000 cubic meters to Waste Control Specialists.
Per federal law, the Energy Department must now wait for some sort of congressional action before moving ahead on disposal. Direction from Capitol Hill has yet to arrive in any form.
Meanwhile, the members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission are still reviewing a 2019 draft regulatory basis in which agency staff determined that most GTCC and GTCC-like wastes could be safely disposed of in a near-surface facility. The report laid out three options for updating regulations: no action, keeping the existing regulatory framework; guidance on GTCC waste disposal, to assist future applications for a method other than a geologic repository; or a full rulemaking that could set the stage for near-surface disposal.
As of March, the commission had not decided on the approach. Staff at the regulator is scheduled this summer to submit a report on a path forward, which could include merging this proceeding with a separate rulemaking on low-level waste disposal.
“The Nuclear Regulatory Commission actually produced a very good draft regulatory basis that provides a lot of information,” Carlson said last week. “In terms of what the steps would be in order to go from where we are today to where the state of Texas could license GTCC, there’s actually quite a bit in there that’s undefined at this point, and so to proceed further there’d have to be more definition put to exactly what steps would be needed there. We would truly only consider working on something like that with consent of the state of Texas, so there’s a lot of steps along the way.”
There was no update on the NRC proceedings this week, an agency spokesman said.
