Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
5/9/2014
During the protracted shutdown of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, sites with transuranic waste, including Oak Ridge and Idaho, are coming up with solutions to storage issues in order to keep processing waste. While waste from those sites was being disposed of at WIPP to meet agreements with Idaho and Tennessee, the repository has not accepted any shipments since a Feb. 5 salt truck fire and a Feb. 14 radiation release. “We have storage problems while WIPP is down. So we are trying to minimize the storage problem and push it out as far as we can,” DOE Idaho Cleanup Manager Jim Cooper said last week at a House Cleanup Caucus Briefing.
The Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project, run by contractor Idaho Treatment Group, LLC, is used to process legacy transuranic waste at the Idaho site and some other wastes for off-site disposition. The plant normally produces about 70 percent transuranic waste to be sent to WIPP and 30 percent mixed low level waste to be disposed of at the Nevada National Security Site or the EnergySolutions facility in Utah. “We can flip that,” Cooper said. “Based upon how we blend the waste we can end up with 70 percent low level waste and 30 percent TRU. In doing that we minimize the amount of transuranic waste that we have to put in backlog. For the mixed low level waste we have a disposition path. It can either go to Utah or Nevada. So those are the kind of mitigating actions that we are putting into place.”
With the WIPP shutdown potentially lasting years, it is unclear how long it will be until DOE would face impacts to any regulatory commitments. Under the Idaho Settlement Agreement with the state, the site must disposition 65,000 cubic meters of transuranic waste by 2018. “Shipping out the mixed low level waste completes the 65,000 cubic meters and it doesn’t stop us as the WIPP is down,” Cooper said. “We can strategically process and progress under the Idaho Settlement Agreement.”
ITG earns fee for shipped waste, so while it will continue to earn from the mixed low level waste shipments, it’s uncertain if it will make money off the transuranic waste it is processing.
ITG has proposed receiving fee for transuranic waste certified for shipment, but DOE has yet to make a decision on that approach, according to Danielle Miller, a spokeswoman for the Department’s Idaho Operations Office. “We have evaluated and have taken action to free up enough storage capacity short term to continue transuranic waste operations and the Department is evaluating options to expand storage capacity long term,” Miller said in a written response. “Regarding the fee, the Department is currently evaluating its options, a decision has not been made.”
AMWTP ‘Running Full Blast’
AMWTP continues to process and store its transuranic waste shipments, ITG President Danny Nichols said at the briefing. “Despite the WIPP extended shutdown, we are running full blast as far as our production. We currently have a little over 180 transuranic shipments certified and stored on site with another 20 mixed low level, so approximately 200 shipments ready to go that are certified and standing,” he said.
The facility also this week completed processing 10 large boxes of waste from Los Alamos National Laboratory that were brought in last November, before the WIPP shutdown. “These are boxes we are doing for them that have a lot of materials like aerosol cans that they couldn’t deal with at Los Alamos,” Nichols said. The site is required to characterize and package the waste within six months and ship it out within the following six months. Processing of the LANL boxes was completed in about two weeks. “So that gives you an idea of how efficient the facility is and how highly trained the employees are,” Nichols said.
At Oak Ridge, Remote-Handled Waste May be Issue
Meanwhile, while Oak Ridge’s Transuranic Waste Processing Center will continue processing contact-handled waste during the WIPP shutdown, storage space for remote-handled waste may become an issue. Storage of processed and packaged waste at Oak Ridge is the challenge. “With CH waste we can process that, package it and move it to the lab,” DOE Oak Ridge cleanup Manager Mark Whitney said at a House Cleanup Caucus briefing this week
Though Oak Ridge National Laboratory has an area for storing contact-handled waste, it can not store remote-handled waste. “However, with RH we have limitations there on site and we can really only hold 14 canisters of the RH material at TWPC. “Then we have a really lack of ability and infrastructure to store it anywhere else on site,” Whitney said. “We are looking right now at options. … We think that even a two-year suspension, we would still be able to make progress on CH. The RH would be an issue.”
The WIPP shutdown is unlikely to impact milestones with the state, according to the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation. “As of this date, the Department of Energy has not notified the State of Tennessee of its inability to meet transuranic waste processing milestones,” TDEC spokeswoman Kelly Brockman said. “The Tennessee Site Treatment Plan (STP) has milestones for processing of the transuranic waste. After processing, the inventory determined to be TRU waste can go back into storage. It will be removed from the STP when the waste is shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). The availability of WIPP being open does not prevent DOE from meeting its STP milestones.”
