In strongly worded comments, the Natural Resources Defense Council and other advocacy groups said the Department of Energy’s proposed plan to reinterpret the definition of high-level radioactive waste would violate the law and should be withdrawn.
The Energy Department “has issued this HLW Reinterpretation Proposal in hopes of providing for itself the authority to define away its most difficult and expensive cleanup problem” while providing no “intelligible criteria whatsoever,” the groups said in comments filed Jan. 9. “Thus, removing vast amounts of HLW by a semantic wave of a magic reinterpretation wand could have enormous cost savings for DOE.”
Congress has designated high-level waste as the “highly radioactive” material resulting from spent fuel reprocessing – the act of separating ingredients in irradiated nuclear fuel and target materials, such as plutonium. Reprocessing waste is treated as high-level “and defined by its origin because it is both “intensely radioactive and long-lived,” the groups said.
The reinterpretation would be contrary to congressional directions in the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act and could allow the Donald Trump administration, or future presidential administrations, “to abandon extraordinary amounts of the world’s most toxic waste at nuclear weapons cleanup sites across the country” by deeming it non-HLW, the groups said. Specifically, reclassification could allow waste to remain in storage tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the groups say. They added that it could lead to “misguided expansions” of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico – where some waste could theoretically be shipped for disposal if reclassified.
The 39 pages of comments, plus 200 pages of exhibits, were filed by the NRDC, Hanford Challenge, Columbia Riverkeeper, Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Southwest Research and Information Center, Snake River Alliance, SRS Watch, and the Institute for Policy Studies.
The proposal announced in October would enable DOE to reclassify high-level waste if it can meet the radioactive concentration limits for low-level radioactive waste, or if the waste can be safely disposed of outside of an underground geologic repository. The United States does not yet have such a repository for high-level waste, which the groups note would be licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, not DOE.
The states of Oregon and Washington have also expressed their opposition to the proposal, which has drawn support from community and industry groups such as the Energy Communities Alliance and U.S. Nuclear Industry Council.
