ACTIVIST GROUPS CALL ON DOE TO DROP PLANS TO SHIP HANFORD TANK WASTE TO WIPP

A set of environmental activist groups is calling on the Department of Energy to drop plans to ship Hanford tank waste deemed to be transuranic material to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant for disposal. Instead, the Department should move forward with the construction of new waste tanks at Hanford, the groups said in a March 26 letter to Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. “The waste proposed for treatment and transfer to WIPP is too small a fraction of the total inventory of Hanford tank waste to make the investment worthwhile and the proposal does not prioritize the leaking single-shell tanks. Further, DOE’s ‘preferred alternative’ would likely have a disastrous impact on both efforts to arrive at a national nuclear waste strategy and associated progress at the WIPP facility from legal, technical and institutional perspectives,” says the letter, which was signed by representatives from the Natural Resources Defense Council, Hanford Challenge and the Southwest Research and Information Center.

DOE announced earlier this month that a preferred alternative for addressing tank waste at Hanford would be to process and ship approximately 3.1 million gallons of waste believed to be transuranic waste in up to 20 tanks to WIPP in New Mexico. Some of the material being considered for disposal as transuranic waste is contained in tanks that may be potentially leaking. Among the concerns raised by the environmental groups, though, is whether DOE has the legal authority to reclassify the tank waste as transuranic material. “In short, under the current NWPA [Nuclear Waste Policy Act], the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) regulate the geologic disposal of HLW—and decide what is (and what is not) HLW. At the Hanford Reservation, DOE may not unilaterally decide that HLW has been transformed into ‘waste incidental to reprocessing’ or ‘TRU waste’ for disposal at WIPP,” the groups said in their letter.

The groups also charged that looking to ship the possibly transuranic material to WIPP would not be a cost-effective option. “A treatment facility to retrieve, process and package Hanford tank waste for shipment to WIPP would be expensive, and time-consuming,” the groups wrote. “Without substantially more information, we are unclear how any such plan could comply with current law. We are unaware of blueprints or plans for such a drying facility, and certainly there is no existing facility at Hanford that could accomplish that mission.”