Waste Control Specialists in West Texas could remain home for up to 74 containers of radioactive waste, which Texas authorities want to evict, for three more years, under an extension announced Thursday by the Department of Energy.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management’s Los Alamos field office issued a task order to keep Waste Control Specialists (WCS) in Andrews County, Texas in charge of continued interim storage and monitoring for the potentially-combustible transuranic waste for 24 months. It also gives DOE a one-year option that could conceivably keep WCS holding the drums until June 2024.
The brief notice on a federal procurement website did not provide a dollar value for the extension, but an accompanying justification for the sole-source contract said it would not exceed $22 million. The current WCS agreement for interim storage of the transuranic waste, originally from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which began in September 2017 and was scheduled to expire June 3, is valued at $29 million.
The DOE announced its intent last month to extend the WCS agreement. Since 2014 the federal agency has issued a series of orders keeping WCS as the temporary home for the material until the containers can be transported to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico. DOE said in the justification that studies done over the past five years show the waste can be removed from WCS and safely sent to the WIPP.
A February 2014 underground radiological release idled the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico for nearly three years. It was first thought that WCS would remain the stopgap home for the drums for perhaps a year.
While most of the containers rerouted to WCS were eventually cleared for shipment to WIPP, most of the ones remaining are believed to have some ignition risk akin to the drum that overheated in the WIPP underground.
The transuranic waste has apparently worn out its welcome as the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has pushed DOE since late 2019 to remove the remaining drums. However, the state commission did recently modify the WCS permit to allow the containers to stay through Dec. 23, 2022. DOE has blamed the pandemic for slowing its efforts to move the containers out of Texas, but hopes to remove many of the containers this year.
