Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
3/07/2014
PHOENIX, Ariz.—As the Department of Energy examines alternatives for its transuranic waste program, it has pledged to the state of New Mexico to complete on time a high-profile Los Alamos disposition campaign despite the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant shutdown, officials said here this week. The clock is ticking on the “3,706 Campaign” to remove the aboveground-stored transuranic waste at Los Alamos by a June 30 deadline. The two most likely options involve a combination of temporary storage of the material at the Waste Control Specialists commercial facility in Texas and Idaho National Laboratory. “The entire DOE team is committed to meeting the 3,706 campaign. We are exploring alternatives both at commercial and federal sites,” Frank Marcinowski, DOE Deputy Assistant Secretary for Waste Management, said at this year’s Waste Management Symposia.WIPP has been offline since a Feb. 5 fire underground, which was followed by a Feb. 14 radiation release. But the repository had been scheduled to be in a maintenance outage from mid-February to mid-March. While it will not reopen in the foreseeable future, sites are continuing to process transuranic waste as normal. “At the moment at the sites we have instructed them to keep packaging up the waste as if we were going to be able to continue the operations. We don’t have a time frame for when we’ll be shipping back to WIPP but we aren’t slowing down any packaging,” DOE cleanup chief Dave Huizenga told WC Monitor here.
The biggest challenge will be completing the campaign at Los Alamos, which has been the focus of an agreement with New Mexico to remove aboveground transuranic waste by the end of June. The bulk of the waste has already been disposed of, and the site hopes to complete packaging the remaining waste in about a month. DOE has told the state it remains committed to completing the effort on time. “We remain, despite our challenges at WIPP, committed to completing that campaign,” Christine Gelles, DOE Associate Deputy Assistant Secretary for Waste Management, said. “We are nearly there, and we are going to find a way to get the rest of that waste off site even if it can’t go directly to WIPP. So we are very actively working on an alternative analysis for that.”
New Mexico ‘Cautiously Optimistic’
Meanwhile, New Mexico is “cautiously optimistic” that DOE can meet its goal, New Mexico Environment Department Secretary Ryan Flynn told WC Monitor at this week’s meeting. He was “very pleased” to receive word from Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz that DOE is fully committed to the 3,706 goal. “I’ve been tough on these guys, and I’m impressed because I think when the government shut down, I was not very sympathetic … I felt like we set a goal and we can’t just say too bad,” Flynn said. He added that before the recent issues, the state did not foresee a major incident at WIPP as a potential roadblock to the LANL campaign. “Their track record has been outstanding. They’re like the good kid,” Flynn said.
Due to WIPP’s continued shutdown, New Mexico is extending deadlines for storing waste aboveground at the site, according to an order by NMED this week. The extension only applies to waste that had reached the facility but had not been placed underground before WIPP was shut down following a Feb. 5 fire. For contact-handled packages to be moved from the parking area container storage into the waste handling building, a 30-day limit has been extended to 60 days. And for contact-handled waste already in the waste handling building, a 60-day limit will be extended to 105 days.
WIPP should not accept new waste until normal operations resume, according to the NMED order. “If the TRU mixed waste stored in the WHB cannot be placed in the WIPP underground by the expiration of the deadlines … the Permittees shall submit a written proposal to the Department outlining alternative storage options ten days prior to the expiration of such deadlines,” the order states.
Idaho and WCS Likely Options
Given its proximity to WIPP, the WCS facility in Texas could be an attractive option for temporary storage of the LANL waste, though it remains to be seen how much storage would cost DOE. The LANL transuranic waste is within the WCS license parameters, according to officials. “WCS is supportive of the New Mexico goal for 3,706, and we’ll do everything we need to to help with that goal,” WCS President Rod Baltzer said.
As another potential option, facilities at the Idaho National Laboratory have already supported the LANL campaign and could potentially provide another solution.”From an Idaho perspective, we have our mission of getting our waste out of Idaho,” James Cooper of DOE’s Idaho Operations Office said. “But the facilities at Idaho National Laboratory are not Idaho’s facilities, they are Department of Energy facilities. They are available to be able to go through and help the transuranic program however we can.” If WCS is utilized, some waste that doesn’t meet that site’s parameters may still be sent to Idaho.
But challenges to the Idaho option include limits on the amount of time the LANL waste could be stored in Idaho, as well as the greater distance from WIPP. “That’s certainly going to be a factor that’s going to be considered. Ideally we want to move the waste as close to its ultimate resting place as possible,” Marcinowski said. “There are a lot of factors that’s going to be considered and that’s one of them as part of the evaluation. Certainly we want to keep the transportation risk, as any other risk, as low as possible for whatever solution is chosen.”
Decision Needed Soon on LANL Waste
Given that the remaining LANL shipments could take close to three months, a decision where to ship the material must be made soon. “We’ve got to evaluate all of our alternatives and make a decision in the next few weeks in order to keep that project on track and meet the June deadline,” Marcinowski said. “So we are going to be taking our evaluation, taking it back and discussing it with senior management and making our decision. I’d say over the next few weeks, but in a very short time frame.”
The waste will continue to pile up at other DOE sites as it is packaged during the WIPP outage. “At Oak Ridge we’ve been processing transuranic waste there. They just, ahead of schedule, reached 50 percent of their RH TRU debris processing, fulfilling a site treatment plan there, so congratulations to Oak Ridge,” Gelles said. “At Idaho we resumed exhumation of buried waste, which is one we’ve had to work hard to accelerate within the constraints of the start of Fiscal Year 2014. Despite the challenges we can continue to have success, and I think the key is for us to find ways to not become too pessimistic in regard to these challenges that we have at WIPP, but to find ways to move forward.”
Future WIPP Operations to Look Different
Even after WIPP comes back online, there will likely be some changes in operations as a result of the events. “We don’t know how long it is going to take to recover and we don’t know how long it is going to take to go back to what we would call normal operations,” Gelles said. “Since this is the first time that we’ve dealt with this kind of event after a 15-year operational history, I think it’s realistic that we recognize that our operations are probably going to be different after this, different than they were in the first 15 years. So what normal operations look like, we are not even yet sure. We are going to work through this collaboratively, and you have our commitment to ensure the safety of the workers and the community.”
