The Department of Energy’s Hanford Advisory Board for the nuclear cleanup site in Washington state, wants the feds to start looking for a second underground disposal site for defense-related transuranic waste —just in case.
DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), near Carlsbad, N.M., is permitted by the New Mexico Environment Department to continue disposing of transuranic waste through 2032. The salt mine “will likely be extended further,” perhaps to the 2070s or beyond if DOE gets its way, the Hanford Advisory Board said in advice drafted for the agency earlier this month.
“We ask them [DOE headquarters officials] to pursue a second repository in case WIPP fills up or shuts down before all our Tru [transuranic] waste gets there,” according to the document. Hanford has thousands of cubic metrics of waste that it plans to start shipping to WIPP in 2028. WIPP’s New Mexico permit finalized in fall 2023 stipulates DOE must start researching the option of developing a second transuranic repository out of state.
Amid her campaign for a second term, Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) on Tuesday filed a bill that would, if enacted, remove Yucca Mountain’s designation as a nuclear waste repository.
The bill would also terminate the not-quite-dead Yucca Mountain licensing proceeding that the George W. Bush (R) administration started with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Barack Obama (D) administration defunded and discontinued.
The designation and the licensing have each endured well beyond the apparent political death of Yucca Mountain as a permanent repository for high-level radioactive waste and spent fuel from nuclear power plants. Sen. Catherine Cortez-Masto (D-Nev.) joined Rosen as a co-sponsor of the Jobs Not Waste Act, the text of which had not been published as of Wednesday morning. Rosen described some of the bill’s features in a press release published Tuesday on her website.
The Amentum-led remediation prime at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee has re-routed two roads, cut trees and cleared 27 acres of land in preparation for construction of the new Environmental Management Disposal Facility, the Department of Energy said this week.
With the first $27-million tranche of prep work done, installation of groundwater monitoring wells is getting underway, DOE said in a Tuesday press release. United Cleanup Oak Ridge is overseeing the landfill project that will hold low-level radioactive construction debris from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Y-12 National Security Complex.
The new and much-discussed 2.2-million-cubic-yard disposal facility should be completed in 2030. It will replace the current on-site disposal landfill, which is approaching capacity limits. Debris from demolition of structures around the old K-25 gaseous diffusion plant area took up most of the capacity in the existing landfill, DOE has said.
The Department of Energy canceled its Northern New Mexico Citizens’ Advisory Board that was scheduled for Wednesday at 1 p.m. Mountain Time.
The next board meeting, for the panel which offers advice on DOE Office of Environmental Management issues affecting the Los Alamos National Laboratory, will be July 17, according to a staff email sent out in the morning. No reason was given for the cancellation in the email sent out to board members and various other parties, including Exchange Monitor.
Billy Starnes has hit the half-century mark as an employee at the Department of Energy’s Oak National Laboratory in Tennessee, the agency said this week.
Starnes started work as an engineering technician, testing uranium-233 processing at Building 3019 in February 1974. “I was one of the first engineering technicians they brought in when they started ramping up the number of people to really go into production,” Starnes said in a DOE press release Tuesday.
Starnes retired from the lab itself in 2023, but only stayed that way for two weeks before joining DOE contractor Isotek. Isotek extracts thorium-229 from uranium-233 at the building. The thorium-229 from Oak Ridge is eventually used in cancer treatments.
