EnergySolutions is calling on the nuclear waste industry to prod Utah regulators into broader acceptance of a proposed sealed source initiative. In a presentation at the Waste Management conference in Phoenix yesterday, EnergySolutions’ Sean McCandless outlined the hot-and-cold stance that the Utah Division of Radiation Control has presented the company on the issue of accepting sealed sources for disposal. Initially seeming to express interest in working with EnergySolutions in solving the issue of sealed source disposal, Utah recently released an agreement with parameters that EnergySolutions did not anticipate. “There are a couple restrictions in there we feel are not safety-driven, and we intend to comment,” McCandless said. "Specifically, if the draft decision limits the nuclides to those that have a 30-year half-life or less … [and] the draft decision also limits the sources to those that are currently within NNSA’s Global Threat Initiative Program. So while we would have a variance that would permit some disposal, it would not be acceptable to the broader industry," McCandless said. But he suggested that industry work together to show Utah regulators the national demand for a sealed source disposal solution. “The Utah Division of Radiation Control may revisit their thinking on those restrictions if there is comment from industry to that effect,” McCandless said.
EnergySolutions has submitted a license variance request for one year wherein the company may work with the Conference of Radiation Control Program Directors to accept Class A sealed sources from around the country for disposal. However, in recent public comment on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Branch Technical Position on Concentration Averaging, UDRC Director Rusty Lundberg wrote that sealed sources “generally constitute large activity, small volume sources of radioactivity,” thus disposing of more sealed sources would “appear to conflict with the original purpose of the Clive facility [large volume, low activity].”
