Waste Control Specialists (WCS) said Tuesday it has received permission from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to keep a potentially dangerous batch of federal transuranic waste in Andrews, Texas, for another two years.
The company in June sought permission to retain custody of the improperly packaged, radioactive nitrate-salt waste from the Energy Department’s Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) until Dec. 23, 2018. Now, “we have secured authorization to keep the LANL TRU waste at our Andrews facility until that date,” WCS spokesman Chuck McDonald said by email Tuesday.
The NRC officially extended the permissible storage period in a Sept. 23 letter to WCS President and CEO Rod Baltzer; the commission posted the letter online Friday.
The LANL waste at WCS is similar to the batch blamed for the 2014 underground radiation leak that shut down DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. WCS got a contract to store the material after WIPP closed and DOE faced a legally binding deadline to move a large cache of nitrate salts intended for disposal at WIPP out of LANL.
At the time it took on the waste, WCS secured permission to store nitrate salts in Texas only through Dec. 23, 2016, by which time DOE and WIPP prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership thought the mine would be open again. Now, WIPP is expected to reopen in December or January, and potentially won’t accept any new waste shipments until April.
The LANL waste at WCS will not ship out that soon. DOE first has to figure out how to prevent the material in Texas from bursting open — a fix is in the works but will not be tested until early next year — and then has to untangle the regulatory cat’s cradle that simultaneously prohibits the agency from either treating the waste at WCS in Texas or shipping it back to LANL.
WCS also needs approval from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to keep the LANL waste in the Lone Star State for another two years, and an extension to its LANL waste storage contract with Nuclear Waste Partnership. The current deal runs through March 2017. McDonald said Tuesday state approval was in the works, but he would not comment on a possible contract extension.
Nuclear Waste Partnership spokesman Donavan Mager could not immediately be reached for comment Tuesday.
