The Department of Energy on Tuesday proposed excluding waste from new plutonium pits and some nuclear-weapons waste generated before 1970 from part of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
The restrictions, which would apply only to Panel 12 at the deep-underground facility, were part of DOE’s Legacy Transuranic Waste Disposal Plan for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), filed Monday with the state of New Mexico and signed by DOE Carlsbad, N.M. field office manager Mark Bollinger, and Ken Harrawood, the president of contractor Salado Isolation Mining Contractors.
The public now has 60 days to comment on the plan. Transuranic waste refers to radioactive waste from defense programs that contains elements heavier than uranium, often plutonium. WIPP is the only deep-underground repository for this kind of waste.
The disposal plan said WIPP should define “legacy” transuranic waste defense-related and “placed in retrievable storage since 1970 or generated from the safe cleanup and risk reduction of the environmental legacy resulting from decades of nuclear weapons development and past defense-related testing and research.”
The definition, DOE said, is meant to be broad enough to include the full range of transuranic and mixed transuranic waste “activities that have the objective of addressing and reducing risks from the longstanding legacy of previous defense nuclear activities.”
The definition “does not include, for example, waste generated as a by-product of ongoing defense missions such as pit production or current R&D activities,” according to the report.
WIPP’s latest hazardous waste permit with the New Mexico Environment Department says much of the planned Panel 12 will be devoted to legacy waste. DOE is currently winding down its emplacement in Panel 8, and the next panel to be filled will be Panel 11, followed by Panel 12, DOE has said.
“Legacy waste is generally understood to be waste associated with historical activities,” DOE said in the disposal plan. “However, there is no agreed-upon common definition of legacy waste or clear dividing line between historical and modern or ongoing activities.”
Don Hancock with the Southwest Research Institute called the plan “totally inadequate.” Among other things, the plan does not well define what is and is not legacy waste and does not certify there is enough capacity to take legacy waste from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Hancock’s comment came in response to an Exchange Monitor inquiry.
To help determine where the line should fall, DOE contacted Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, the Hanford Site in Washington state, Idaho National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and Savannah River Site in South Carolina, according to the document.
DOE and its WIPP contractor will seek public comment for 60 days following submittal of the disposal plan, according to the document. That would come out to roughly Jan. 3, 2025. Comments can be emailed to [email protected].
