The New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) wants to know more about the Energy Department’s proposal to change the way it counts the volume of transuranic waste emplaced at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
In a June 27 letter, called a technical incompleteness determination, the state agency asked DOE and WIPP management contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) to answer a number of questions by July 30, including how the volume calculations would be conducted and where they would be reported.
In February, DOE and the contractor asked the state for a site hazardous waste permit modification that would allow them to forgo counting the empty space between drums inside a waste container in their disposal volume calculations. That would officially reduce the volume of waste now at the underground mine near the city of Carlsbad by about 30 percent under the 1992 WIPP Land Withdrawal Act, according to Todd Shrader, manager of DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, which oversees WIPP. The Energy Department believes the act was meant to count actual waste, not empty space, Shrader recently told a National Academies panel in California.
New Mexico said June 1 the change would be treated as a Class 3 permit modification, which requires a more extensive review and the opportunity for a public hearing. The DOE had filed its request as a Class 2 modification.
Among other things, the state wants details on how the volume calculation process would be regulated. “Please provide details of DOE’s plan or mechanism to track and report waste volumes pursuant to the [Land Withdrawal Act]. Please clarify if DOE will use fill factor or inner container volumes,” John Kieling, head of NMED’s Hazardous Waste Bureau, wrote in the letter to Shrader and NWP President and Project Manager Bruce Covert.
The New Mexico letter also asks what type of access the public will have to WIPP’s waste volume tracking results. “Please clarify if the action will be retroactive” by counting waste already empaneled at WIPP, Kieling wrote.
“We will insist that it not be retroactive because the permit should not rewrite history,” said Scott Kovac, operations and research director for the advocacy organization Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
Shrader expects it could take an additional year to win New Mexico approval for the new method of counting waste volume at WIPP. A Class 3 permit revision takes about 12 to 24 months, “and we are about halfway through that,” he said during the June 26 National Academies meeting.
After the Energy Department and NWP reply to the incompleteness document, NMED will prepare a draft permit that will undergo a public comment period of at least 45 days. A hearing could be requested by interested parties and Kovac said his group might seek a hearing depending on how the draft permit looks. Such a hearing would involve an in-depth examination of permit revision issues. Eventually a state hearings officer would issue a report with findings of fact and legal conclusions, and NMED Environment Secretary Butch Tongate will issue a decision.
More discussion on the proposal is expected July 19 when DOE and the contractor conduct their next WIPP Town Hall.
