As the Energy Department mulls how much of its legacy transuranic waste will have to be repackaged under the stricter new Waste Acceptance Criteria that went into effect at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) this week, the agency is quietly buying itself more time to deal with the problematic waste that caused the plant’s closure in the first place.
In 2014, a chemical reaction in an improperly packaged container of transuranic waste shipped from the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) blew open and leaked radiation into the underground salt mine near Carlsbad, N.M. The accident was blamed on organic kitty litter that reacted with nitrate salts in the container. The burst drum is still in WIPP’s Panel 7 storage area, and the mine is still closed to new waste shipments.
Now, under the new WIPP Waste Acceptance Criteria that took effect Tuesday, DOE has barred shipping combustible materials to WIPP in the agency’s oft-used pipe overpack containers and criticality control overpacks. Neither the LANL container that popped open in WIPP, nor waste like it that is stored elsewhere, is packaged in such containers, a DOE spokesperson said Friday.
However, the new criteria mean the agency and its contractors cannot simply place the problematic LANL transuranic waste into such packaging and send it off for disposal. “[W]aste streams packaged in [pipe overpack containers] or [criticality control overpacks] that contain combustibles are excluded from shipment to the WIPP, excluding radiological control materials and packaging materials normally used to load the containers,” according to the new WIPP Waste Acceptance Criteria.
There are more than 300 containers holding organic cat litter and nitrate salts already at WIPP, in the mine’s Panel 6 and Panel 7 disposal areas. Some nitrate salt waste from the troublesome stream is still at LANL. More than 100 additional containers, according to DOE’s WIPP website, are stored at Waste Control Specialists’ commercially owned and operated facilities near Andrews, Texas, about 1 mile from New Mexico’s southeast border.
DOE is moving to keep the waste where it is, for the time being, while the agency continues to work on its plan to make the material safe enough for disposal.
In Texas, Waste Control Specialists has permission from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to store a cache of troublesome LANL waste only until Dec. 23, 2016. However, the company is seeking a two-year extension because WIPP, while slated to reopen Dec. 12 for disposal of waste already waiting above ground, will not begin accepting new waste shipments until early 2017.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has yet to grant Waste Control Specialists’ request, which the company submitted in a letter posted online June 5 by NRC. There have been “no new developments” with regard to the extension, a Waste Control Specialists spokesperson wrote in a June 29 email to Weapons Complex Monitor.
A two-year extension of the NRC order — something the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality also must approve — would give Waste Control Specialists permission to store the LANL waste for nine months beyond what its current storage contract with WIPP prime Nuclear Waste Partnership allows.
Waste Control Specialists’ LANL waste-storage subcontract with Nuclear Waste Partnership runs through March 2017 and would be worth $25.4 million over that period of time, including options. When awarded March 31, 2014, the deal covered one year of storage for $8.8 million, a spokesperson for the WIPP prime wrote in a June 30 email.
Meanwhile, although LANL personnel are ramping up their work for dealing with the lab’s problematic transuranic waste, the DOE facility is moving extra cautiously on returning its transuranic waste processing facilities to pre-WIPP-accident levels, documents published online recently by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) show.
In a report covering inspections made the week of May 23, the board wrote LANL personnel had capped off all remaining 55-gallon drums of what the lab calls “Inaproppriately Remediated Nitrate Salts” with pressure relief devices that could prevent the sort of explosion that released radiation into WIPP more than two years ago.
The lab is also rolling out its master plan for treating the nitrate salt-bearing waste at LANL and Waste Control Specialists. Lab personnel in mid-May issued their project execution plan — in DOE parlance, “the governing document that establishes the means to execute, monitor, and control projects” — for the lab’s Nitrate Salt Safing and Treatment Project.
However, LANL’s Area G transuranic waste processing facility remained in limited operations, at Weapons Complex Monitor’s deadline.
DOE on May 13 “submitted to the NNSA Field Office for review and approval, an [Evaluation of the Safety Situation] for three Potential Inadequacies of the Safety Analysis (PISA) for transuranic waste inventory discrepancies in Area G,” DNFSB wrote in a report dated May 20. “NNSA Field Office approval of the ESS will allow Area G to return to OPERATIONS MODE, and as such will serve as a Justification for Continued Operations as well,” the report reads.
However, a LANL spokesperson said Friday the “The Evaluation of the Safety of the Situation (ESS) referenced in the May 20 DNFSB Site Representative report is still under development. Area G is currently in a limited condition of operations to ensure the safe storage of transuranic waste at Los Alamos National Laboratory.”
Elsewhere in the DOE complex, even waste that had nothing to do with WIPP’s closure will be subject to tighter scrutiny; under the new Waste Acceptance Criteria, all of DOE’s legacy transuranic waste will be audited before it is cleared to go to WIPP.
“All previously certified waste containers not currently disposed at WIPP will need to be validated to ensure the revised requirements are met prior to shipment to WIPP,” the Carlsbad Field Office said in a press release announcing the new Waste Acceptance Criteria. “Some wastes may need to be treated and repackaged prior to shipment to WIPP but it will take the Department several months to determine which, if any, wastes may be impacted.”
There is nearly 55,000 cubic yards of contact-handled transuranic waste stored across eight sites in the agency’s nuclear complex, plus almost another 5,000 cubic yards of the more dangerous, more radioactive remote-handled transuranic waste at 10 DOE nuclear sites, according to the 2015 Annual Transuranic Waste Inventory Report.
For reference, 1 cubic yard is roughly the capacity of the front scoop on a pickup-truck-sized bulldozer.
Currently, DOE’s plan for dealing with the remote-handled transuranic waste is to keep it where it is. This sort of waste will not be accepted for delivery to WIPP when the facility reopens, a DOE spokesperson said.
“There is no projected date for the resumption of RH TRU shipments at this time,” the DOE spokesperson wrote in a Thursday email, using two common abbreviations. There is some transuranic waste stored above ground at WIPP — it was delivered before the accidents that shut the mine down — but there is no remote-handled transuranic waste among that cache, the spokesperson said.
The last time any remote handled transuranic was interred at WIPP was “mid-January of 2014,” the DOE spokesperson said.
