ARLINGTON, VA. — This winter the Department of Energy and Waste Control Specialists should start moving remaining containers of transuranic waste, stuck at the company’s Texas facility for nine years, to a new above-ground storage facility to prep the material for shipment to the agency’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
The “notional” deadline is 2026 for moving 74 standard waste boxes of problematic transuranic waste, generated by the Los Alamos National Laboratory, out of the Waste Control Specialists (WCS) Federal Waste Facility in West Texas, company President David Carlson said Wednesday during panel discussion at the National Cleanup Workshop here.
“We have been working closely with the department and now have, certainly, hopefully, over this winter a pathway to move that above ground so that it can be examined and so the next steps can be taken,” Carlson said.
The transuranic waste was rerouted to WCS in 2014 after the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) temporarily ceased operations due to an underground radiation leak that occurred after an improperly remediated drum from Los Alamos, similar to the ones now at WCS, ruptured.
The WIPP outage would last for about three years but dozens of waste boxes from Los Alamos remained at WCS because some shared potential ignition traits with the Los Alamos drum from the WIPP accident.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, recently with the help of the Texas attorney general’s office, have pressured DOE’s Office of Environmental Management to move the waste.
This is something that is “long desired I think by every party,” Carlson said. He expect significant progress on the project to occur within the next 12 months.
