The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management says 8 gallons of recycled wastewater from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina can be hauled to a Texas disposal facility with minimal risk.
Shipping the waste from the SRS Defense Waste Processing Facility to the Waste Control Specialists disposal site in West Texas will be the first pilot test of DOE’s reinterpretation of high-level radioactive waste (HLW), agency officials said in a webinar last week.
The pilot could one day lead to DOE transporting 10,000 gallons of such wastewater away from SRS to a low-level waste disposal facility such as WCS.
For now, though, the focus is on the first several gallons, Theresa Kliczewski from the Office of Environmental Management’s (EM) Office of Waste and Materials Management said.
More study and public participation will occur “when and if” DOE goes forward with a much larger amount of wastewater from the DWPF, which turns high-level radioactive material into glass, Kliczewski said.
Last month DOE said it expects within roughly a year to ship the 8 gallons to WCS, where it will be mixed with a concrete-like grout and disposed of on-site. This mixture will be considered non-HLW and treated as Class B low-level waste.
The 8 gallons is currently at Tank 22 at the Savannah River Site’s H Tank Farm and it includes contaminates such as cesium-137, James Joyce, who also works with the Office of Waste and Materials Management, said during the webinar.
But the wastewater contains less radioactivity than typical petroleum industry well logging devices, or blood irradiators used at hospitals, Joyce said. While slides that accompanied the presentation said the pilot shipment could start as soon as Aug. 26, the agency officials declined to say when the waste hauling is scheduled to start.
The officials did indicate one reason WCS was picked is because it is already licensed to take Class B low-level waste while EnergySolutions in Utah is not.
The Energy Department is reinterpreting definition of the term “high-level waste,” which it says should be based on radiological risk rather than the origin of the material.
The final environmental assessment was published last month.
During the webinar Kliczewski said her office has finished a draft of a report, called for in the fiscal 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), discussing feasibility, costs, and cost savings of classifying certain defense nuclear waste as something other than high-level radioactive waste. The report was originally supposed to be out by Feb. 1, 2018. But the DOE official noted it is still not been issued yet by the agency.
