Staff Reports
WC Monitor
9/25/2015
As with other Department of Energy sites impacted by the ongoing suspension of operations at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, the shipments of transuranic waste at Oak Ridge have been placed on hold – although processing and certification of wastes continue.
The situation in Tennessee is complicated by the pending transition of contractors to manage DOE’s Transuranic Waste Processing Center. At this point, there is still no ruling from the Government Accountability Office on multiple protests filed against the award of the $123.9 million contract to North Wind Solutions in June. Ben Williams, a spokesman for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management in Oak Ridge, said the department anticipates a ruling on the protests by mid-October. The current management contract with Wastren Advantage Inc. (WAI) has already been extended until Oct. 18 to allow for the appeals process.
“However, if necessary, we do have three, one-month options on the WAI contract that will allow progress to continue through January,” Williams said in an email response to questions.
The DOE spokesman said there will be a 45-day transition to the new contractor once the protests are settled, with the company assuming responsibility for the operations at the TWPC. “In the meantime, WAI continues to safely operate the facility and is making good progress,” Williams said. “To date, nearly all of the contact-handled waste has been processed (471 cubic meters out of the total of 487 that’s on site) and approximately 86 percent of the remote-handled debris (398 cubic meters out of the total 490 that’s on site) is complete. We remain on schedule to complete debris processing in Fiscal Year 2018.”
DOE said the total Oak Ridge inventories, from the onset of processing operations, were 1,523 cubic meters of contact-handled transuranic waste and 653 cubic meters of remote-handled debris. Still to come are the inventories of remote-handled sludges. A procurement is still in the works for a test facility, to be followed by an actual processing facility for the highly radioactive materials.
Members of the DOE Central Characterization Program team have been in Oak Ridge since last October, evaluating the waste that has been processed, packaged, and prepared for delivery to WIPP. The New Mexico facility is expected to resume storage operations sometime in 2016 following a fire and subsequent radiation leak in February 2014, according to DOE officials.
