A Department of Energy contractor at the West Valley Demonstration Project in western New York could send another shipment of legacy waste containers to Waste Control Specialists in Texas this summer, a DOE spokesperson said Monday.
DOE announced in a press release last week that eight legacy waste containers, each weighing about 94,000 pounds, were recently sent to a disposal site in Texas.
The spokesperson confirmed in a Monday email the low-level radioactive waste shipment was sent to Waste Control Specialists in Andrews County, Texas. Another shipment, this time with seven containers, should go down this summer, the spokesperson added.
The work is being done by DOE’s Jacobs-led contractor CH2M HILL BWXT West Valley (CHBWV).
A large crane was used to place the containers from the old Fuel Recycling and Storage Facility into a haulage container for the trip to Texas. The storage facility, used for seven years between 1965 and 1972, held spent fuel before it was reprocessed.
CHBWV has a contract, currently valued at almost $1 billion, for remediation of the state-owned sites that once housed a private company’s nuclear fuel reprocessing plant. The contractor’s current agreement is set to expire in February 2025. The Jacobs-BWX Technologies team has held the cleanup work since August 2011.
DOE is currently evaluating bids for a new West Valley remediation contract that could be worth $3 billion.
