PHOENIX — The Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Richland, Wash., is scheduled to start shipping defense-related transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in 2028 and could start as early as 2027, a DOE contractor boss said here Wednesday.
Michael Douglas, the head of waste projects for Amentum-led Central Plateau Cleanup Company, made his remarks during a panel presentation at the Waste Management Symposia.
While the official target is 2028 for shipments from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), if all goes well “we could bump that up a year” into 2027, Douglas said. Once it gets the green light to start, Hanford probably has two years of contact-handled transuranic (TRU) waste virtually ready for shipment, Douglas said.
“Great news on the TRU waste front,” Douglas said of the potential 2027 shipments, when speaking at a different session Thursday.
There are thousands of containers worth of contact-handled, as well as the more-radioactive remote-handled transuranic waste, at Hanford. Most of it is not close to ready for shipping. Much of the TRU waste still needs to be dug up, screened for combustible material, packaged and vetted before being certified for WIPP shipment, Douglas said.
Resuming TRU shipments to WIPP is a priority for Hanford as well as WIPP, officials have said.
Hanford shipped TRU waste to WIPP until 2011, prior to a 2014 underground accident at WIPP that would sideline the disposal site for three years. In response to a reporter’s question, Douglas said Hanford had paused its TRU waste program in 2011 due to budgetary and other reasons.
By waiting until now to revive the Hanford TRU program, Hanford is able to benefit from the lessons learned by Idaho National Laboratory and other sites that resumed shipments in 2017 when WIPP resumed operations, Douglas said.
Hanford will build a significant amount of infrastructure in the near future to pave the way for the WIPP shipments, Douglas said. Hanford has the benefit of having a Perma-Fix waste facility in Richland, Wash., to help with the TRU effort although Perma-Fix cannot support the amount of volume Hanford needs to transport in the long term, Douglas said.