Storing transuranic waste in certain containers near the border of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) campus may be riskier than site management believes, according to a report released late Friday by the Energy Department’s Office of Enterprise Assessments (EA).
EA personnel visited the Livermore, Calif., lab’s Building 332 Plutonium Facility and Waste Storage Facility from March 14-18, according to the report.
The Waste Storage Facility handles, stores, and treats transuranic and other waste. Some of the waste in the facility is packed in pipe overpack containers: specially sealed barrels designed for transuranic waste above a certain radioactivity threshold that is bound for permanent disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M.
LLNL assumed there would be little damage if pipe overpack containers at the Waste Storage Facility were engulfed in a pool of burning fuel. The assessment is based on accepted DOE guidelines, the report notes, which assume pipe overpack containers are extremely safe, vulnerable only to accidents such as puncture by forklift.
However, DOE is evaluating whether pipe overpack containers are as safe as previously thought. If the agency decides they are not, the official risk calculation at LLNL’s Waste Storage Facility might have to be changed, EA warned.
Pipe overpack containers are also piling up at the Building 332 Plutonium Facility because of an ongoing effort to reduce the amount of nuclear material stored there, the report says. DOE tests plutonium and highly enriched uranium at Building 332 to support the Pentagon’s nuclear arsenal. This generates transuranic waste.
Meanwhile, if WIPP does not resume acceptance of transuranic waste across the DOE complex by 2018, LLNL could run out of space at its Waste Storage Facility. The lab “has looked at options for increasing TRU waste storage capacity but has not initiated specific planning,” according to the EA report.
WIPP is expected to start receiving new shipments of transuranic waste in February, a DOE official at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., said June 7.
The Department of Energy late Wednesday released a draft solicitation for support services for the development of a supplemental environmental impact statement for the West Valley Demonstration Project and Western New York Nuclear Service Center.
The planned five-year contract includes a three-year base period with two one-year options. This procurement is 100% set aside for small business competition and covers technical support for a legally mandated environmental review DOE must conduct of its plan to decontaminate and demolish facilities at the former spent fuel reprocessing plant in upstate New York.
Interested parties have until July 6 to submit comments on the draft request for proposals to [email protected], DOE said in the document posted online Wednesday.
The supplemental environmental impact statement on which the winner would work will be published in draft form in 2019, DOE has said.
The agency did not say when the final request for proposals would hit the street.
Despite fanfare over the plant’s official completion last week, South Carolina has not forgotten the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site is now projected to start radioactive waste treatment three years later than mandated, and remains in talks with the agency over the repercussions of the blown deadline.
“The Department of Energy has missed a number of deadlines and continues to ask for extensions associated with the startup of the Salt Waste Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site,” a spokesperson for the state’s Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC) wrote in a June 10 email. “The deadlines are important to managing critical risk reduction for South Carolina. DHEC has been working with DOE to address these deficiencies, but to date, the issues are unresolved. DHEC is seeking commitments from DOE for robust waste treatment to make up for ongoing project delays.”
DOE announced last week its prime contractor on SWPF, Parsons Government Services, beat the construction deadline the agency established in a 2014 baseline that raised the cost of the facility by about $1 billion to an estimated $2.3 billion. However, the rebaseline pushed the start of waste operations out to Dec. 3, 2018, roughly three years later than the federal facilities agreement that DOE, South Carolina, and the Environmental Protection Agency signed to govern cleanup of the former weapons-material production site.
So far, South Carolina has held off on imposing penalties of $105,000 a day for the missed deadlines, which could be retroactive as far back as 2011. These include certain SWPF construction milestones.
SWPF is designed to treat 95 million gallons of salt waste distilled from the liquid waste in Savannah River Site’s tank farms. The facility cost about $1.3 billion to build over eight years and can, according to Parsons, process 9 million gallons of waste a year. The current salt waste treatment system at Savannah River, the Actinide Removal Process and Modular Caustic Side Solvent Extraction Unit, can process roughly 1 million gallons a year.
RRC-JGMS NHO, of Wexford, Pa., will perform a variety of technical and management services for the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management under a four-year, $4 million indefinite-quantity, indefinite-delivery contract announced Monday.
The contract includes firm-fixed-price and time and material task orders for management services of DOE EM facilities and infrastructure; program and project management; technical support; and communications and outreach, among other services, DOE said.
The pact covers work at “various” sites, EM said in its press release, without citing specific locations within its nine field offices or two headquarters locations.
RRC-JGMS NHO is a limited liability company registered Feb. 19, 2015, according to documents filed with the Pennsylvania Department of State. The state agency’s online portal did not list the names of any company officers. The company’s listed headquarters is an office building some 15 miles north of Pittsburgh by road, nearby a Noodles and Co. chain noodle shop.
