After a federal judge blocked Dallas-based Waste Control Specialists’ takeover by EnergySolutions of Salt Lake City, the Texas company is still trying to figure out what to do with more than 100 potentially flammable containers of transuranic waste it is storing for the Energy Department.
Asked what the canceled merger means for the company’s contract to store the material for DOE — Waste Control Specialists (WCS) has had custody of the waste from the Los Alamos National Laboratory since 2014 under a contract now worth more than $25 million — a company spokesperson declined to comment.
“However, we are continuing to work with DOE and our state regulator to identify a satisfactory solution for this waste which must ultimately be shipped to WIPP [DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant] for disposal,” WCS spokesman Chuck McDonald wrote in an email Friday.
The containers at WCS hold the same sort of inappropriately packaged nitrate salts that exploded underground at WIPP in 2014, leaking radiation into the mine and prompting DOE to suspend shipments of transuranic waste to the facility until April 7.
Much of the waste at WCS must be treated before it can ship to WIPP. However, some of the waste in West Texas is already safe to transport, DOE has said.
In the detailed fiscal 2018 budget requested DOE released in June, the agency said it planned to “break down the [WCS] inventory into waste containers that can be shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, and waste containers that will require treatment before being shipped.”
So far, DOE has confirmed three shipments to WIPP from WCS since April 7, according to the agency’s official WIPP Waste Data System. The most recently confirmed shipment arrived at the mine on June 22.
