PHOENIX — Waste Control Specialists and the Department of Energy are negotiating an extension of the contract for the company’s continued storage of transuranic waste from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, a WCS executive said Tuesday. The current contract expires on March 31.
WCS’ Andrews County, Texas, waste storage facility has held more than 100 barrels of radioactively contaminated material from LANL since 2014 under a contract with Nuclear Waste Partnership, the management and operations contractor for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. The laboratory waste could not be sent to WIPP, which had closed to new shipments that year earlier following a fire and subsequent, unrelated radiation release.
“We are working with DOE, the [Environmental Management] Consolidated Business Center, right now for a new contract,” Dan Burns, WCS senior vice president of planning and business development, said here during a panel discussion at the annual Waste Management Symposium.
Burns said current negotiations are occurring directly with DOE.
Some of the containers at WCS are from the same “family” as the container that blew open at WIPP in 2014, containing the same combustible mix of nitrate salts and kitty litter, Burns said. The substances were mistakenly packaged together at Los Alamos by a DOE subcontractor.
