For the second time in two years, the Department of Energy is looking at shipping certain radioactive waste, now classified as high-level, from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina to a commercial disposal site out of state.
The DOE said in a Wednesday press release it will issue a Federal Register notice within days announcing plans for a draft environmental assessment for the commercial disposal of contaminated process equipment from Savannah River Site at commercial sites in either Utah or Texas.
A link to the planned Federal Register notice can be found here.
In addition, DOE is also a notice to enact what it deems a “limited change” to its 435.1-1, Radioactive Waste Management Manual, to formally incorporate the 2019 interpretation of the statutory definition of high-level radioactive waste.
The assessment will analyze whether the waste could be disposed of as non-high-level radioactive waste at either the EnergySolutions disposal facility in Utah or the Waste Control Specialists (WCS) site in West Texas. The department would dispose of the process equipment under its June 2019 interpretation finding some material currently classified as high-level is not hazardous enough to merit disposal in a deep underground repository, such as the stalled Yucca Mountain project in Nevada.
The waste material that would be transported from Savannah River out of state would include the Tank 28F salt sampling drill string, glass bubblers, and glass pumps. The components were used during on-site treatment of the reprocessing waste.
As a pilot case in 2020, DOE sent eight gallons of reclassified waste, stabilized wastewater grout, from Savannah River to the WCS facility in Andrews County, Texas.
“EnergySolutions remains committed to DOE’s cleanup efforts throughout the complex, including opportunities to safely disposition waste that meets our Waste Acceptance Criteria at our various facilities,” said company spokesman Mark Walker in a Friday email. “This includes the dispositioning of the processing equipment from Savannah River Site if DOE elects to seek commercial support,”
Waste Control Specialists declined to comment. “WCS is authorized to accept low-level radioactive waste for disposal and is not authorized to accept high-level radioactive waste for disposal,” Brian McGovern, a spokesman with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, said via email Friday. The Department of Energy must meet WCS’s waste acceptance criteria and all applicable regulatory requirements for waste disposal, he added.
A spokesman for the Utah Department of Environmental Quality did not respond by early Friday.
In a report to Congress last week DOE said billions of dollars could be saved if lawmakers legally changed the classification of certain high-level waste that might not require the highest risk designation based on its radiological traits.
While the DOE under the Donald Trump administration spent much of its tenure pushing for Friday changes to what should be treated as high-level under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, a South Carolina citizen group advocate said the efforts are intensifying before the reins are assumed by President-elect Joe Biden.
“It’s obvious that there is a flurry of activity regarding changes in high-level waste policy before current DOE appointees leave office,” said Savannah River Site Watch’s executive director Tom Clements. “Given the last-minute nature of this, I believe that these efforts to implement new policies will be reviewed by the new administration and are thus far from being final.”