The Energy Department’s prime cleanup contractor on the former West Valley spent-fuel reprocessing facility in upstate New York on Wednesday shipped the first of three massive loads of contaminated vitrification equipment on its way to a private disposal facility in Texas.
Lynette Bennett, a spokeswoman for CH2M Hill BWXT West Valley, confirmed Thursday the equipment had left the West Valley Demonstration Project aboard an enormous truck. The site is about 35 miles south of Buffalo, N.Y.
The vitrification equipment, used years ago to turn more than 650,000 gallons of high-level liquid waste from West Valley into easily storable glass canisters, is on its way by road and rail to Andrews, Texas, where it will be interred in the privately owned Federal Waste Facility operated by Waste Control Specialists.
There are two more shipments of vitrification equipment slated for disposal in Andrews, but Bennett declined to discuss their contents or shipment dates, citing security concerns. In all, 400 tons of vitrification equipment are headed to Andrews, including a melter cauldron and the two tanks that fed it.
The 275, 10-foot-tall glass canisters of waste will remain in West Valley, for now, and could for decades to come.
Despite efforts at the site to keep its departure quiet, the shipment of West Valley vitrification equipment made a splash online after a New York man captured the equipment on video moving through a residential neighborhood aboard a specialized heavy-duty rig sporting more than 100 wheels.
The video, posted Wednesday, had racked up almost 400,000 views at deadline Friday for Weapons Complex Monitor. On Wednesday and Thursday, the clip was among the top stories at the online discussion mega-hub, Reddit.
West Valley was the only U.S. site ever to reprocess spent fuel from commercial nuclear reactors. The now-defunct Nuclear Fuel Services provided reprocessing from 1966 to 1972, ceasing after a regulatory clampdown prompted the U.S. power industry to make an abrupt left turn away from spent fuel reprocessing.
Congress declared West Valley a cleanup site in 1980, but it took more than a decade before the site’s vitrification plant began turning liquid waste into glass. Vitrification ran from 1996 and 2002.
DOE’s Office of Environmental Management awarded CH2M West Valley Demonstration a West Valley Demonstration Project Interim End State Contract in 2011. The pact runs through at least March 9, 2020, and is worth roughly $525 million.
As a former commercial site, West Valley is unusual in the DOE Environmental Management complex. The site was not part of the Pentagon’s Cold War weapons program, so waste generated there cannot be sent to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico; some of West Valley’s solid waste is physically and radiologically similar but legally distinct from what DOE calls transuranic waste.
These days, West Valley is being demolished in phases. Phase one is ongoing, and a draft DOE environmental impact statement on phase two demolition is not expected until 2019. The second demolition phase will cover any work at the site the ongoing first phase did not. How long that will take will remain an open question until DOE decides how it will dispose of the remaining high-level waste canisters and the site’s legally not-transuranic waste.
Phase one calls for removal of: the main plant processing building; the vitrification facility used to immobilize once-liquid high-level waste generated during spent-fuel reprocessing; and the source area for a 650-foot-by-1,640-foot groundwater plume at the site’s north plateau.
