The Energy Department contractor at the West Valley Demonstration Project near Buffalo, N.Y., recently finished shipping the last of the site’s legacy low-level radioactive waste for disposal.
Contractor CH2M HILL BWXT West Valley (CHBWV) finished the shipments on Sept. 6, seven months ahead of the April 2019 deadline, a spokesman said by email. The waste, debris from prior cleanup operations, predates the 2011 start of the $542.3 million CHBWV cleanup contract at West Valley.
About 86 percent of the waste had been shipped by the end of 2017, according to an annual site environmental report published on Sept. 10. That encompassed 45 shipments over the year.
The contractor is responsible for disposing of industrial, hazardous, mixed hazardous, and low-level waste from West Valley. The LLRW was sent to disposal facilities such as EnergySolutions in Utah and the Waste Control Specialists site in Texas, the spokesman said. It encompassed about 180,000 cubic feet or 151 shipments over time.
Newly generated low-level waste produced by ongoing environmental remediation operations is being addressed under the current contract, the spokesman said.
West Valley is state-owned and covers about 200 acres of the 3,300-acre Western New York Nuclear Service Center. Between 1962 and 1972, the site was home to the Nuclear Fuel Services reprocessing plant.
The BWXT-CH2M contract runs through March 2020. The work includes deactivating and tearing down highly radioactive facilities, and disposing of their components.
On Oct. 10, the DOE Office of Environmental Management issued a request for information (RFI)/sources sought notice for the next phase of cleanup and soil remediation at West Valley. The deadline for responses to the RFI was Thursday. Contractors did not have to reply to the RFI in order to submit a bid for the work in a future request for proposals.
For its part, CHBWV has declined to say whether it plans to bid again.
In the request for information, DOE asked prospective contractors to discuss their ability to do remediation and to provide “innovate end states” to speed ultimate cleanup.
Phase 1 cleanup at West Valley is currently anticipated to wrap up by 2030, a decade longer than expected when DOE in 2010 issued an environmental impact statement on the project. The department is working on a supplement to the EIS, a draft of which should be out in 2020.
