Waste Control Specialists said this week the legacy nuclear waste it is baby-sitting for the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory — including some from the problematic batch that leaked radiation into the underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) — should remain in Texas for two years longer than the company’s current license allows.
In a June 15 letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Dallas-based company said transuranic waste from the New Mexico laboratory — generated by U.S. nuclear weapons programs — is stable at the company’s disposal grounds near Andrews, Texas, and shows no signs of the sudden heating that might presage the sort of explosive chemical reaction that in 2014 blew open a container of contaminated material and released radiation into WIPP.
“Daily temperature monitoring has shown that temperatures within the are consistent and stable and typically fluctuate with ambient temperatures,” Waste Control Specialists wrote in a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) dated June 15 but posted online Tuesday. “Thus far the monitoring has not detected any sudden temperature spikes.”
The NRC is still reviewing the company’s request, a Waste Control Specialists spokesperson told Weapons Complex Monitor on Thursday. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality must also sign off on the extension.
An NRC spokesperson confirmed Thursday the agency is still reviewing the request for an extension, and that “no precise timeline has been established” for a final ruling.
An NRC order handed down in 2014 allows Waste Control Specialists to keep the federal waste in Texas until Dec. 23, 2016. Waste Control Specialists requested a two-year extension in March, telling NRC that the company and DOE needed more time to figure out how to ship the material safely to WIPP, once the facility reopens. The NRC on June 6 asked Waste Control Specialists for more information. Specifically, the agency wanted to know if there had been any change in the condition of the canisters of Los Alamos transuranic waste now stored in Texas about 30 miles from the New Mexico border.
Some of the containers stored in Texas could contain the organic kitty litter packed by mistake into barrels of nitrate salts from Los Alamos’ Area G transuranic waste facility. The kitty litter was implicated in the 2014 radiation leak at WIPP. While Waste Control Specialists would not confirm specifically where the Los Alamos waste is kept, the waste fits the acceptance criteria for the company’s Federal Waste Facility. Conversely, the Los Alamos waste could not legally be kept in the company’s Compact Waste Facility, the Waste Control Specialists spokesperson said.
WIPP is slated to reopen in December, and to begin receiving new shipments of transuranic waste from across the DOE complex as soon as February. Eventually — but apparently not immediately — the containers of Los Alamos waste in Waste Control Specialists’ care will be sent to WIPP, too, as originally planned. DOE and WIPP prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership are two months behind a public schedule for the WIPP reopening released in February; a critical document that governs the mine’s new safety procedures was approved in May, rather than late February, as listed on the public schedule. Both parties insist WIPP will reopen in December, but neither party replied to requests for comment this week about how much margin they built into the reopening schedule.
When WIPP shut down in 2014, DOE was in the middle of removing more than 4,800 cubic yards of high-risk transuranic waste then stored above ground at Los Alamos’ Area G. At the time of the accident, more than 4,500 cubic yards of that waste had already been shipped off-site, according to a DOE spokesperson in Washington. Most of that went to WIPP, but some was decontaminated and reclassified by Los Alamos as mixed low-level waste and disposed of at DOE’s Nevada National Security Site.
To deal with what remained of Los Alamos’ high-risk, Area G transuranic waste after WIPP closed, DOE in 2015 awarded Waste Control Specialists a one-year, $8.8 million storage contract. The waste was shipped out of Los Alamos in 2014, when Waste Control Specialists was still under an unfinalized letter contract that gave DOE time to start moving the waste as it put the finishing touches on the final contract.
Waste Control Specialists holds two licenses from the The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality: Radioactive Materials License No. 4100, which was issued Sept. 10, 2009, and expires Sept. 10, 2024; and Industrial and Hazardous Waste Permit No. 50397, which was issued Dec. 23, 2008, and expires Dec. 22, 2018.
A spokesperson for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality confirmed by email Friday the state would have to consent to license modifications for Waste Control Specialists to store the Los Alamos waste in Texas for a further two years.
EDITOR’S NOTE: this story has been corrected to clarify that DOE sent no transuranic waste to the Nevada National Security Site, which may not accept such material. A previous version of the story also gave incorrect values for the amounts of transuranic waste removed from LANL Area G at the time of the WIPP closure. The correct value now appears above. June 29, 2016, 3:00 p.m.
