The U.S. Energy Department announced on Sept. 6 it would keep BWX Technologies as a contractor for storage of radioactive hot cell waste and spent nuclear fuel.
The department’s Idaho Operations Office and Office of Nuclear Energy announced plans to issue the sole-source, five-year contract for continued waste storage at a BWXT facility in Lynchburg, Va.
“This work could possibly entail the preparation, packaging, and transportation of material for shipment of the radioactive material from the BWXT facility to either an interim or final storage facility,” according to the procurement notice, posted on FedConnect. “If during the 5-year period-of-performance of the contract the DOE decides it is necessary to move the radioactive material the DOE would enter into further cost negotiations with BWXT for the preparation, packaging, and transportation of the radioactive material.”
The award will be a firm-fixed-price contract. The Idaho Operations Office will in writing justify not conducting a competitive procurement, the notice says. But other parties can inform DOE that they believe they can meet the requirements of the contract. Notices must be sent by email no later than noon Mountain time on Sept. 30, to contract specialist Mark Payne, at [email protected].
The DOE procurement notice did not provide additional details, including the anticipated value of the new contract and the amount of waste BWXT holds in storage. The company declined to comment, “other than to say that we are pleased with the DOE’s notice of intent to continue our storage of this material for an additional five years.”
A subcommittee of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee on Wednesday advanced legislation that would expand the mission of the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) to aiding permanent disposal of U.S. radioactive waste.
The waste language is one part of the much broader ARPA-E Reauthorization Act of 2019 from Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), which the House Science energy subcommittee has now sent to the full committee for consideration.
The legislation would update language on ARPA-E’s goals, as laid out in the 2007 America Competes Act that established the energy technologies development organization. If Johnson’s measure becomes law, ARPA-E would be tasked to “provide transformative solutions to improve the management, clean-up, and disposal of radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel.”
“This bill … authorizes ARPA-E to better address DOE’s significant nuclear waste clean-up and management issues, for which the Department currently spends billions of dollars every year trying to manage with current technologies,” Johnson, who chairs the House Science Committee, said in a prepared statement for the subcommittee markup.
As of deadline Friday for RadWaste Monitor, the committee had not scheduled its markup of the bill.
Johnson’s legislation is similar to an ARPA-E reauthorization bill from committee Ranking Member Frank Lucas (R-Okla.). The Lucas proposal offers slightly more granular language on the types of waste to be addressed by ARPA-E’s “transformative solutions”: low-level radioactive waste, spent nuclear fuel, and high-level radioactive waste.
Johnson’s bill would authorize increasing spending at ARPA-E in coming years, from $428 million in the federal 2020 budget year that begins Oct. 1 to $1 billion in fiscal 2024. The subcommittee rejected an amendment from Rep. James Baird (R-Ind.) that would have kept the funding authorization below $400 million for each year through fiscal 2022.
Lucas proposed much tighter authorizations, from $392.8 million in fiscal 2020 to $500 million in fiscal 2024. The Republican’s bill has not yet gotten a markup in the House panel.
Waste Control Specialists (WCS) this summer submitted and then quickly withdrew a request that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) approve changes to state regulations on fees and charges for low-level radioactive waste disposal.
David Carlson, WCS president and chief operations officer, did not discuss the reason for retracting the July 17 petition in an Aug. 21 follow-up to the state agency.
The revisions would have applied to the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Facility that Dallas-based WCS operates in Andrews County on behalf of the state.
Specifically, had the request been approved, the Texas Administrative Code would have been updated to reduce the curie inventory charge for the facility from $0.40 per millicurie to $0.05, while the trigger for applying the container surface dose rate surcharge of would have increased from 500 to 5,000 roentgens per hour. The surcharge is $400 per cubic foot.
“These changes will reduce costs to our customers and are necessary to remain competitive with other low-level radioactive waste (LLRW) disposal options,” Carlson wrote in the July letter to TCEQ Executive Director Toby Baker. Without the updates, “WCS will suffer financial harm that could, and will likely compromise the long term viability of Texas’s only low level radioactive waste disposal facility.”
Waste Control Specialists operates one of four licensed commercial facilities for disposal of low-level waste in the United States. The Compact Waste Facility is one branch of its larger disposal complex near the state border with New Mexico.
Texas and Vermont are the only members of the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact. However, 34 other states without their own LLRW compact can send waste to the site, at higher fees and charges.
Those non-compact waste producers generate 95% of revenue for the Compact Waste Facility, which could not remain operational without that money, Carlson wrote in July. He noted that surcharges for waste disposal fees from generators in non-compact states were scheduled to nearly double on Sept. 1, from 16.25% to 31.25%.
“This almost 100% surcharge increase to non-compact customers will drive many of them to do business with our competitors instead of with WCS,” Carlson stated. “The resulting loss of revenue to the CWF will have a significant impact on this facility which is already operating at a financial loss.”
A TCEQ spokesman on Wednesday said there was no indication that Waste Control Specialists would resubmit the petition, but that the company and state agency have discussed fees and surcharges.
Waste Control Specialists opened its facility in 2012. It lost millions of dollars for former owner Valhi Inc. prior to being sold in January 2018 to private equity firm J.F. Lehman & Co. The company has sought assistance from the state government and legislature to strengthen its financial footing.
A former employee at the URENCO USA uranium enrichment facility in New Mexico has been barred from conducting Nuclear Regulatory Commission-licensed activities for one year.
Justin Roberts was working as a contract assembler at the plant in Eunice in September 2016 when he placed an unidentified, confidential part into another worker’s lunchbox, according to an NRC order issued on Sept. 5. That person then unknowingly took it home. Security staff at the plant reported the component missing to the FBI on Sept. 20, 2016, the same day the employee alerted URENCO that he had found the item in his lunchbox.
The NRC investigated the incident through October 2018. It found only Roberts’ fingerprints on a sheet of paper also placed in the lunchbox, determined he was among just eight people who had access to the part in question, and provided dishonest testimony “regarding his work for his previous employer and his employment status.”
“Based on the physical evidence obtained that demonstrates that Mr. Roberts had handled the paper found in ETUS Employee #1’s lunchbox, along with Mr. Roberts access to the component and demonstrable lack of credibility, it appears that Mr. Roberts removed the component from the clean room and placed it in ETUS Employee #1’s lunchbox,” according to the order.
That action put the facility in breach of federal regulations on nuclear facility security clearance and safeguards of national security information and restricted information, the order says.
The one-year prohibition prevents Roberts from doing, supervising, aiding or otherwise participating in any work conducted under NRC specific or general licenses. For a year afterward, he must alert the agency to any initial employment in NRC-licensed operations, according to an NRC press release.
While the NRC cited the URENCO plant for breach of regulatory security requirements, it did not issue a penalty as the company had identified and addressed the matter.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in July again spent little of its remaining balance from the fund intended to pay for a federal nuclear waste repository.
The agency spent just $704 in the month for unspecified program planning and support. That left the NRC with a total balance of $434,262, with $408,039 of that not yet committed to cover any expenses, according to the latest spending report to Congress.
As she has regularly in recent months, NRC Chairman Kristine Svinicki said in a letter attached to the report that “there are no significant actions to report for the month,” just “limited program planning and support activities that resulted in nominal expenditures.”
The agency last spent more than $1,000 from the fund in February, an outlay of $1,249.
The NRC in 2008 began reviewing the application from the Department of Energy for a license to build and operate a repository under Yucca Mountain, Nev., for the nation’s spent nuclear power plant fuel and high-level radioactive waste. The Obama administration terminated funding in 2010, but a federal appeals court in August 2013 ordered the regulator to resume the licensing proceeding.
As of July it has spent just over $13.1 million of the more than $13.5 million from the fund it had on hand at the time of the ruling. Major expenses have included completion of a safety evaluation report for nearly $8.4 million and preparing an environmental impact statement supplement at just shy of $1.6 million.
The Trump administration has in two budget cycles failed to persuade Congress to appropriate funding to resume Yucca Mountain licensing at DOE and the NRC. The House in June zeroed out the White House request for nearly $116 million for the upcoming fiscal 2020. The Senate should this week release its funding bill that would cover nuclear waste management.
From The Wires
From the Casper Star Tribune: Spent nuclear fuel storage in Wyoming would provide only $10 million in annual revenue, state lawmakers told.
From the Cape Cod Times: Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office blames Nuclear Regulatory Commission electronic filing system for missing deadline by 22 minutes to request a stay of the license transfer for the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station.
From the London Independent: Japan eyes discharging radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean.
From Waste Dive: Proposed regulations on disposal of technologically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive material (TENORM) in Montana could bring additional energy exploration and production waste into the state.
From Reuters: Bosnia fights Croatian nuclear waste disposal approach.
