Members of the Low Level Radioactive Waste Forum put Waste Control Specialists on the hot seat yesterday at the group=s fall meeting in Santa Fe, N.M., quizzing the company on how it would prioritize what waste it will import from out-of-compact generators. Rich Janati, chief of the Pennsylvania Division of Nuclear Safety, asked WCS President Rod Baltzer, “How do you go about prioritizing the import of waste? What factors are you looking for—the date of contract? Is it first come first serve? Or type of waste—sealed source versus Class B and C versus irradiated components?” Janati added, “There’s an annual limit on waste import so these are the factors you have to look at, how do you go about prioritizing waste.” WCS will have to find a balance when it opens its Compact Disposal Cell—estimated for later this year—between taking high-revenue waste streams like Class B and C waste, while being mindful of the curie limitations imposed on the site in its license. For the first year, WCS will have a higher curie limit than every subsequent year—220,000 curies as opposed to 120,000 curies.
But what waste the company will be able to import is also subject to approval of importation contracts by the Texas Compact Commission and state regulators the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. “How do we characterize who gets to import first?” Bob Wilson, chairman of the Texas Compact Commission, said at the meeting. “We have no criteria and the legislature has not told us what to do. So our part of the discussion needs to be, what are those criteria?” Wilson mentioned that the issue could be a topic of discussion at a proposed workshop the Texas Compact Commission plans to hold next month on issues remaining before operations at WCS are underway. Baltzer said WCS “is in a very good position to provide a recommendation to the Compact Commission on who our potential customers are, and we know enough about the volume and the curies that we can get a good revenue mix.” Baltzer added that “these are the things that [non-compact] generators and WCS are working through and hopefully we can present to the Commission.”
