The Energy Department apparently still hasn’t submitted a report to Congress due on Feb. 1 on classifying certain defense nuclear waste.
The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal 2018, signed last December, said the “Secretary of Energy shall conduct an evaluation of the feasibility, costs, and cost savings of classifying covered defense nuclear waste as other than high-level radioactive waste, without decreasing environmental, health, or public safety requirements.”
The status of the document is unknown, Kara Colton, director of nuclear energy policies at the Energy Communities Alliance, said Sept. 13 during a panel discussion at the Nuclear Cleanup Workshop in Alexandria, Va.
Liquid high-level waste resulting from nuclear defense work accounts for roughly 90 million gallons of material stored mostly in tanks at DOE locations such as the Hanford Site in Washington state and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Colton and others around the weapons complex believe the Energy Department already has authority to reinterpret HLW under the Atomic Energy Act.
Classifying waste by its characteristics, rather than where it comes from, seems to be the objective of the NDAA-mandated study, Colton said.
In a 2017 report, ECA urged the Energy Department and Congress to consider redefinition of high-level waste. The organization, which represents communities near Energy Department sites, believes this would allow treated HLW that qualifies as transuranic waste to be sent to DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico, or a private facility, rather than having to wait on establishment of a permanent repository for high-level waste.
This is an area DOE is “actively working on now,” Assistant Energy Secretary for Environmental Management Anne Marie White said earlier this month. Interpreting the definition of high-level waste more on content is “an admitted semi-obsession,” she said during a keynote speech at the ExchangeMonitor’s RadWaste Summit in Henderson, Nev.
White leads DOE’s nuclear cleanup office, which did not respond by deadline to a query regarding when the report might be filed.
