The New Mexico Environment Department said June 1 it was not ready to decide whether to change the way it measures the volume of transuranic waste disposed of underground at the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP).
The New Mexico agency plans a more extensive “Class 3” review of the site permit modification, which requires more public input that the previously planned “Class 2” modification.
Environment Secretary Butch Tongate said in a letter to DOE and Nuclear Waste Partnership the state would treat the pending change the facility’s hazardous waste facility permit as a “Class 3” modification, which provides for a public hearing.
Tongate said volume measurement is both complex and of significant public concern, which “requires the more extensive procedures of Class 3.”
Class 3 is designed for major permit changes, said Scott Kovac, operations and research director for the nongovernmental advocacy organization Nuclear Watch New Mexico. Class 3 also allows for negotiations between DOE, NMED, and intervening parties on any issues which can be agreed to prior to the public hearing, Kovac said by email.
A Class 3 change could take a year, while a Class 2 update can take several months, Kovac added. The New Mexico Environment Department did not respond by deadline with additional detail on the classification issue.
Nuclear Watch New Mexico opposes the volume recalibration, in part because it sees it as part of a wider effort to expand WIPP, which is already disposing of waste in Panel 7 of its currently authorized 10 panels.
In addition, Energy Secretary Rick Perry announced a plan last month to cancel the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) in South Carolina. Both the Donald Trump administration and the Senate Appropriations Committee have endorsed the idea of making WIPP the default destination for 34 metric tons of processed plutonium that was supposed to be converted into nuclear reactor fuel at the MOX facility.
Perry’s proposal would convert the unfinished MOX facility into a nuclear-warhead core production plant and diluting the surplus plutonium for disposal at WIPP. However, Congress remains wary of the plan and a federal judge this week issued a preliminary injunction barring DOE from stopping work on the MOX plant.
In January, DOE requested the empty space between drums inside a standard waste container no longer be counted as waste for measurement purposes at WIPP. The change would apply both to future waste emplacement and material already at the site.
The recalculation would delay the point at which the site will meet its waste limit under the 1992 WIPP Land Withdrawal Act. WIPP has to date filled 90,000 cubic meters of its 175,565-cubic-meter limit under the legislation. The change would reduce the current waste volume level to 60,000 cubic meters, or just a little more than a third of the limit, according to Kovac.
But going to a new counting method alone would not enable WIPP to handle the additional shipments resulting from a MOX cancellation. Additional added space would have to be added underground, sources have said.
