ARLINGTON, VA — The Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is weighing a new strategy for moving transuranic waste stuck for years at Waste Control Specialists (WCS) in Texas, a federal manager said Thursday.
The new plan would declare several acres inside the WCS property in Andrews, Texas a temporary “DOE island,” said Jessica Kunkle, Office of Environmental Management field manager for Los Alamos. On the sidelines of the National Cleanup Workshop, Kunkle responded to Exchange Monitor questions about the status of the waste.
“We have basically been looking to implement a DOE island out in Texas,” Kunkle said. The temporary DOE status would enable DOE to prep the 74 remaining cans of transuranic (TRU) waste at the commercial site before moving it to the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee. From Oak Ridge, the waste would finally go to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M.
More analysis of the new plan is necessary and DOE will know more in three or four months, Kunkle said.
As recently as a couple of years ago, DOE’s plan was to use a temporary enclosure at WCS to prepare the waste for the trip to WIPP.
“When we finally did retrieve those buried containers,” which have been at WCS since 2014, the containers had water in them and it “made us … pivot to a different strategy,” Kunkle said.
WCS was only meant to be a temporary stopover. But the containers of TRU waste from Los Alamos have been stranded at the commercial disposal site in West Texas since 2014.
WCS is less than 90 miles from WIPP. In early 2014, DOE diverted a shipment of WIPP-bound waste from Los Alamos to WCS after a drum of waste from Los Alamos ruptured in the WIPP underground and caused a radiation leak. WIPP was offline for about three years due to damage from the February 2014 accident. Matters were complicated by findings that the drums now at WCS shared ignition risks with the Los Alamos drum that overheated at WIPP. The drums have been buried in shallow ground at WCS.
Texas told DOE before the COVID-19 pandemic the transuranic waste involved, feared to be a combustion risk, had worn out its welcome and DOE needed to move it elsewhere.