Moving transuranic waste stored at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state to an underground disposal site in New Mexico would be completed by September 2050 instead of 2030 under a proposed change by agencies involved in remediating the former plutonium production complex.
The delayed schedule for moving transuranic waste from Hanford to DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. will be the subject of a virtual public meeting at 5:30 p.m. Pacific Time on May 13, according to a notice issued Monday.
The meeting is jointly scheduled by DOE, the Washington Department of Ecology and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The agencies that signed the 1989 Tri-Party Agreement on Hanford cleanup recently finished talks on revised milestones for tackling radioactive solid waste at the site. A registration link for the meeting is here.
The Tri-Party Agreement agencies are accepting public comment between now and June 14. Hanford last shipped transuranic waste to WIPP in 2011.
“The current schedule for the work is not feasible,” apparently in part because of a February 2014 underground radiation leak at WIPP, which damaged the salt mine and kept the disposal site out of service for about three years. WIPP reopened in 2017 at reduced capacity and is not expected to reach pre-accident waste emplacement levels until a major new ventilation project is finished around 2025.
“Under the proposal, 99% of the [transuranic mixed] TRUM waste would be shipped to the WIPP by 2040,” according to a fact sheet published with the public comment notice. “A few large containers would be dealt with between 2040 and 2050.” The final tranche would include a few of the more-radioactive “remote-handled” containers “that would benefit from 20 years of radioactive decay,” according to the notice.
Over time, Hanford crews will retrieve about 17,500 containers of waste stored underground in Hanford’s low-level burial grounds to see if drums hold mixed low-level waste with a hazardous or chemical component, or primarily transuranic waste, according to the notice. About 11,000 containers have already been dug up and are now stored above ground at Hanford’s Solid Waste Operations Complex.
The Department of Energy Tuesday awarded a five-year financial assistance renewal grant to the Savannah River Site Community Reuse Organization.
The $5-million funding spread over five budget periods will enable the Community Reuse Organization to continue with its “Workforce Opportunities in Regional Careers I” program to provide job training for people in several South Carolina and Georgia counties seeking to work at the DOE’s Savannah River Site, DOE said in a press release.
The Savannah River Site Community Reuse Organization will provide residents in the two-state region with a chance to learn skills needed for careers with DOE’s Office of Environmental Management and the semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration missions, particularly those at the Savannah River Site, according to the news release.
Rick McLeod, the executive director of the reuse organization, said in a Tuesday email the “bulk of the workforce grants go to the academic institutions we have partnerships with.” Also, part of the grant goes to scholarships and marketing training programs at each college and university, he added.
The grant move is funded 60% by Environmental Management and 40% by NNSA and there is also a separate worker development grant funded by NNSA, McLeod said.
Established by Congress in 1993, the Savannah River Site Community Reuse Organization supports regional planning and economic diversification in five counties around the DOE complex. The service area includes the counties of Richmond and Columbia in Georgia, and Aiken, Allendale, and Barnwell in South Carolina, according to the group’s website.
