The Department of Energy and the environmental cleanup contractor at the Hanford Site in Richland, Wash., have started certifying containers of transuranic waste in preparation for eventual shipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico.
DOE’s Office of Environmental Management said in a Tuesday announcement that it is working with Amentum-led contractor Central Plateau Cleanup Company to certify drums of defense-related transuranic waste for disposal underground at WIPP.
Transuranic waste work at Hanford, the former plutonium production site, was put on hold in 2011, the DOE nuclear cleanup branch said in the news release. Planning and preparation for resumption of WIPP shipments started in 2018. DOE hopes Hanford will again be hauling waste to WIPP by Sept. 30, 2028.
DOE, however, has told the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board it hopes to beat that timeline.
Hanford’s Central Waste Complex currently stores about 11,000 containers of transuranic waste, mostly in 55-gallon drums, DOE said. Before containers of waste are deemed safe for transport to the salt mine disposal site at WIPP they are evaluated for “physical, chemical and radiological properties,” according to DOE.
Separately, DOE’s Environmental Management office also said it sent WIPP drivers and other representatives recently to discuss transportation safeguards with members of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in northeastern Oregon. The area is one of many that trucks carrying containers of transuranic waste will pass through on the way to WIPP. WIPP is near Carlsbad, N.M.
Transuranic waste typically consists of tools, clothes, rags, debris, contaminated with small amounts of plutonium or other radioactive material, according to DOE. WIPP is the nation’s only underground disposal site for such waste. It is managed for DOE by Bechtel-led Salado Isolation Mining Contractors.