The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said this morning it found no significant environmental impact from allowing Waste Control Specialists to move containers of long-stranded Department of Energy transuranic waste to another location within the company’s Andrews County, Texas property.
The move, sought by Waste Control Specialists (WCS) 11 months ago, would allow relocation of 74 containers of potentially-ignitable transuranic waste, generated at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, to an enclosure at the WCS Treatment, Storage, and Disposal Facility Bin Storage Area, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) said in a Federal Register notice.
Moving the standard waste boxes from the current location at WCS Federal Waste Facility would be an early step toward preparing the containers for shipment away from WCS, NRC said.
The transuranic waste will stay in the enclosure until DOE ships the Los Alamos waste “off the WCS site to a future DOE determined location, which is currently expected to be either the DOE LANL [Los Alamos] or the DOE Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) Facility,” according to the Federal Register notice.
The containers are among those originally rerouted to WCS due to a February 2014 underground radiation leak at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M. The transuranic waste has been stuck in West Texas after some containers were found to have traits similar to the Los Alamos drum that overheated and ruptured in the underground disposal site. Most of the transuranic drums, not found to have the ignition characteristics, were already shipped on to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
The state of Texas has been pushing the DOE Office of Environmental Management for about four years to move the waste that has overstayed its welcome.
The environmental assessment and finding of no significant impact cited in the Federal Register notice are publicly available as of Thursday, May 18, NRC said.
