Staff Reports
WC Monitor
9/18/2015
The Department of Energy and state of Washington’s proposed new Tri-Party Agreement milestones for cleanup of solid waste at the Hanford Site may not be realistic, say critics of the proposal. The state of Oregon has sent a letter to DOE and Washington saying deferring much of the work to the 2020s could make it impossible to finish by 2030, when the current permit to operate the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant could expire. The Hanford Advisory Board raised similar concerns at its September meeting. Comments are being accepted on the proposed milestone change package until Sept. 25. They may be sent to [email protected].
“Our biggest concern is that it appears too much work related to transuranic waste retrieval, packaging and shipping is being deferred until after 2020,” according to the letter4 from Ken Niles, assistant director of the Oregon Department of Energy. Retrieval, packaging, and transportation of transuranic waste from Hanford to WIPP in New Mexico have not been a high priority for DOE in recent years, and Oregon has been willing to accept delays because it also had higher priorities at Hanford, Niles said. “In the abstract, we are willing to accept some continued delays related to Hanford’s transuranic waste,” he said. “However, we are concerned that so much work will have been deferred to the 2020s that it will be impossible to achieve it all within the new timeframes.” The Hanford Advisory Board wrote in its advice to DOE and the state of Washington that it “believes a 10-year window – 2020 to 2030 – is not enough time to meet future designated cleanup obligations.”
The new milestones deliberately put off retrieving more waste, which had been temporarily buried at Hanford after Congress said in 1970 that transuranic waste must be sent to a national repository – but one was not available. Now Hanford has 20,000 containers of suspected transuranic waste covered by the proposed new milestones, with about 12,000 of those still buried and 8,000 stored in the Central Waste Complex. The state and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have issued formal findings and notices that areas at the Central Waste Complex do not comply with safety and environmental standards. Regulators also have found that many of the wastes are stored without the legally mandated characterization and treatment, according to the advisory board.
Proposed deadlines would require submitting a change request to establish a schedule for retrieving temporarily buried waste in 2020 and completing the retrieval of remote-handled and certain contact-handled waste in 2028.
The plan under the new proposed milestones is for “just-in-time” processing of buried waste. Waste that is eventually dug up would be packaged and shipped to WIPP promptly, rather than being left in storage for years. A new retrieval schedule would not be set until 2020, under the proposed milestones. WIPP has been closed since February 2014 following an underground truck fire and then a spread of contamination from a drum that burst. DOE said in July that the original plan to reopen WIPP in March 2016 was no longer viable, and some advisory board members said at their September meeting that they believe the facility might not start accepting waste again until 2018. Oregon wants shipments of waste from Hanford to resume before 2020. “It would be a mistake to assume DOE could meet an aggressive shipping schedule from Hanford over a reduced period of years, without allowing for bad weather that may impact shipping schedules; a transportation accident that could stop shipping for an extended period; or another shutdown of WIPP for whatever reason,” Niles said in the letter from Oregon.
The solid waste yet to be processed includes three waste streams that are a problem for DOE. Now some transuranic waste is being shipped just offsite at Hanford to Perma-Fix Northwest for packaging. But Perma-Fix does not have the capabilities to handle oversize boxes of debris contaminated with plutonium or other transuranic waste, remote-handled waste, or containers of waste with radionuclide levels above the limits in its license. Those waste are “not a large quantity, but it is expensive to deal with,” said John Price, the Tri-Party Agreement section manager for the Washington State Department of Ecology. DOE may spend 25 percent of its budget for the solid waste work covered by the milestone on that waste.
The proposed milestones would require DOE to study options for developing capabilities for handling and packaging oversize and remote-handled waste, including new on-site capabilities or off-site commercial capabilities, by 2018. “Developing the capability to deal with remote-handled waste at Hanford has been deferred for more than a decade and it’s long past time to move forward with this,” the Oregon letter said.
Oregon and the advisory board both have raised concerns about other milestones being renegotiated by DOE and its regulators for Hanford Central Plateau work and how that could impact the milestone change package now out for public comment. The change packages still being developed cover investigation and cleanup of about 1,000 past practice waste sites and cleanup of processing canyons and their associated waste sites. The work they cover could cost $10 billion, by some estimates. The milestones are interconnected, which the advisory board said leaves it without a comprehensive understanding from which to consider prioritizing the solid waste milestones up for comment now.
Without knowing the funding requirements for all the milestones, the state of Oregon has “no way to determine whether the new milestones are reasonable and achievable,” Niles said. “We also are unable to determine whether this work would be done at the expense of some other projects which we would rank as a higher priority.” Price said that in the near term the proposed solid waste milestones would require about $20 million per year to meet. During the project’s peak year in the 2020s, $250 million would be needed for the year’s work, he said. If the Richland Operations Office budget remains at about $1 billion a year, the solid waste project would require about a quarter of it, he said.
