NorthStar Group Services has requested approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for disposal in Idaho of 2 million gallons of wastewater from decommissioning at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant.
The agency on June 23 informed a subsidiary of the New York City-based environmental solutions provider, NorthStar Nuclear Decommissioning Co., that it had accepted the application for a full technical review. There was no immediate word on the schedule for that evaluation.
With federal approval, up to 1 million gallons of wastewater would be shipped annually to US Ecology’s disposal facility near the city of Grand View in southwestern Idaho. It will be mixed with clay for disposal as a soil-like material, according to the May 20 filing from NorthStar, which was posted June 15 to the NRC website.
The material to be shipped will be comprised of process water and infiltration water contaminated by various radionuclides, the application states.
The US Ecology facility is not licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The exemption is needed to ship material from an NRC-licensed facility to one outside its purview.
A decision from the agency is expected in less than a year.
“An exemption would be approved if it was demonstrated that any dose to the public from such disposal would be less than a few” millirem per year, NRC spokeswoman Diane Screnci said by email Monday.
NorthStar said it “developed this request and related evaluation in consultation with [US Ecology], including health physics personnel responsible for the Grand View disposal facility’s waste acceptance and radiological performance assessment programs. This assessment team performed a radiological dose assessment of the material to be shipped and determined that the potential dose equivalent for the Maximally Exposed Individual involved in the transportation and placement of the material will not exceed ‘a few mrem per year.’”
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in June 2017 authorized shipment of 200,000 gallons of wastewater from Vermont Yankee to US Ecology.
Then-owner Entergy closed the single-reactor power plant in December 2014. In January 2019, it sold the facility to NorthStar, which assumed all responsibility for decommissioning, site restoration, and spent fuel management. The company expects to complete decommissioning by December 2026.
Jacobs said Wednesday it started work in June on a four-year contract to provide technical services for the United Kingdom’s repository for low-level radioactive waste.
The contract is valued at £9 million ($11.2 million), according to a release from LLW Repository Ltd.
Work carried out under the repository infrastructure framework deal will include mechanical and electric services, installing pumping systems, civil construction, and augmenting electronic systems at the facility in Cumbria.
“We look forward to working with LLWR to provide long-term support and help position them as a recognized center of excellence,” Jacobs Critical Mission Solutions Senior Vice President Clive White said in a company release. “Our multi-disciplinary approach will support the safe and effective management of the repository.”
Low-Level Waste Repository Ltd. is a subsidiary of Nuclear Waste Management Ltd., a joint venture of nuclear and environment specialist Amentum, nuclear waste management provider Studsvik UK, and nuclear services company Orano. It operates the repository for its owner, the U.K. government’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. The 61-year-old facility is used for disposal of contaminated waste from commercial and defense nuclear operations, along with other industries, academia, and research activities. The waste largely consists of contaminated paper, cardboard, plastic, protective clothing, soil, debris, and metal.
In May, Dallas-based Jacobs said it had been contracted for two years by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority to analyze the radioactivity release from samples of irradiated graphite from U.K. nuclear power reactor cores. That study is intended to assist the analysis of graphite behavior and eventual management of graphite waste.
The next meeting of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board (NWTRB) will address research and development at the Department of Energy on geologic disposal of dual-purpose canisters designed only for transportation and temporary storage of spent fuel from commercial nuclear power plants.
In light of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, the meeting will be conducted online from July 27-28. Sessions will begin each day at 12:30 p.m. Eastern time and conclude at 5 p.m. The detailed agenda, along with information on accessing the meeting, will be posted on the NWTRB website a week ahead of time.
“Speakers representing the DOE Office of Nuclear Energy and the national laboratories will report on R&D projects related to the feasibility of disposing in a geologic repository the SNF stored in DPCs without repackaging the SNF into other canisters,” the federal agency said in a press release. “Speakers will review past studies on the technical feasibility of disposal of DPCs, including the technical bases for the engineering feasibility and thermal management of DPC disposal. The Board will hear presentations on DOE’s ongoing R&D activities. Speakers will address analysis of DPC reactivity, which is used in criticality calculations, criticality consequence analyses for the period after the repository closes, and development of fillers, which could be used to fill the void spaces inside a DPC prior to disposal, and filler testing capability.”
The independent agency is comprised of up to 11 part-time board members – scientists and engineers – and a roughly equal number of professional staff. It is generally budgeted at $3.6 million per year to offer technical and scientific peer review regarding management and disposal operations at the Department of Energy for high-level radioactive waste and used nuclear fuel.
From The Wires
From the International Atomic Energy Agency: International Technical Committee on Radioactive Waste Management, Decommissioning and Environmental Remediation issues annual report.
