The Energy Department apparently still hasn’t submitted a report to Congress due 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 redesignate HLW under existing authorities such as 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.
Congress in 1987 designated Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the site for that repository, but the site has made scant progress since then and remains highly controversial. A minibus appropriations package, approved by Congress and providing funding for DOE and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, does not include any money in fiscal 2019 for Yucca Mountain. At deadline the bill had not been signed by President Donald Trump.
Waste classification 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.
“A lot of what we call high-level waste actually already meets disposal requirements as Class A, B, or C [low-level radioactive] waste,” although DOE has not disposed of it that way, White said afterward. “If it came from reprocessing, boom, it’s high-level waste” under current practice.
“There’s opportunities within the existing definition, in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, for a different interpretation,” she added. White said the agency is still grappling with the specifics of how a re-interpretation would work.
White leads DOE’s nuclear cleanup office, which did not respond by deadline to a query regarding when the report might be filed.
