PHOENIX — Hanford Site managers in Washington state intend to have their transuranic waste program certified by the Department of Energy in fiscal 2026 and start shipping to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico in 2028, a contractor official said at a conference last week.
Mike Douglas, waste projects manager for Amentum-led Central Plateau Cleanup Co., made the assessment during a Thursday session at the Waste Management Symposia conference.
It has been more than a dozen years since Hanford has sent waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., Douglas said. Many people who did that work have retired or are no longer at Hanford, he said.
Hanford will initially make one or two shipments weekly and send all of its contact-handled transuranic waste to WIPP by 2039, according to Douglas’s slide presentation. The more-radioactive remote-handled waste should be disposed of at WIPP in the 2040s, according to the presentation.
According to a DOE document from October 2023, roughly 70,000 containers of transuranic waste, which includes radioactively contaminated rags, tools and debris, were stored in Hanford Area 200’s low-level burial grounds. Douglas said crews are testing the canister to ensure they are fit to travel to WIPP.
“About 24,000 cubic meters of suspect transuranic waste is to be processed and an estimated 10,000 cubic meters will eventually be shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant,” according to DOE’s recently-released fiscal 2025 budget request justification.
“What we are finding is about a 12% dropout rate,” Douglas said. That’s the percentage of canisters stored in the transuranic area that actually turn out to be low-level radioactive waste, he added.
DOE tightened vetting of waste drums headed to WIPP after a February 2014 accident in which an improperly remediated container from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico overheated, burst open and caused an underground radiation leak. The accident contaminated parts of the underground and forced WIPP out of operation for about three years.
A 10-year Strategic Vision document released by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management for 2024 through 2034, only says that Hanford will resume transuranic waste shipments to WIPP “later in the decade.”
