WASHINGTON, D.C. — Under pressure from the state of Texas, the Energy Department’s nuclear cleanup office has agreed to relocate drums containing potentially combustible radioactive transuranic waste stored since 2014 at the privately operated Waste Control Specialists facility in Andrews County.
“We are going to work to disposition the legacy TRU waste from Los Alamos [National Laboratory in New Mexico] that we currently have stored at WCS in Texas and meet the commitments we have made to the state there,” Energy Department Senior Adviser for Environmental Management Ike White said on Jan. 31 during a presentation to the Energy Communities Alliance (ECA) annual meeting.
“The state of Texas has asked us to get that waste moved …. by the end of this calendar year,” White said. “We are going to do our best.”
The top official at DOE’s Office of Environmental Management did not say when the relocation might begin.
The head of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) told then-Deputy Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette in writing on Nov. 26 the state is no longer willing to keep the drums beyond this year while DOE performs additional environmental studies on issues such as whether to treat the drums on-site before they are moved to WIPP or another Energy Department location. The “continued status quo of meetings and studies is untenable,” according to the Texas letter.
The letter to Brouillette, who in December succeeded Rick Perry as energy secretary, gives DOE until March 31 to file a plan detailing a schedule for moving the waste out of Texas by Dec. 23, 2020. Texas has yet to receive the DOE plan, TCEQ spokesman Brian McGovern said in a Monday email.
The drums have been at WCS since April 2014, about two months after a radiological leak underground halted operations at the DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. Waste Control Specialists agreed to temporarily store WIPP-bound drums from Los Alamos at its waste disposal complex, apparently within its Federal Waste Facility. But the drums became stranded after it was learned some of the Los Alamos drums held the same incorrectly remediated nitrate salts mixture as the drum that overheated and caused the underground radioactive leak at WIPP.
Texas and DOE initially agreed to a one-year storage limit at WCS, and the state eventually approved a pair of two-year extensions requested by the federal agency. The latest extension expires this December.
Since WIPP resumed taking waste shipments in April 2014, DOE has removed more than 80% of the original 582 drums after they were deemed not to pose a combustion risk. That leaves 113 drums of Los Alamos TRU waste that share corrosion traits with the drum that overheated.
Texas Commission on Environmental Quality Executive Director Toby Baker said in the letter that when the state agreed to store the waste it was under the impression that all of the drums complied with U.S. Department of Transportation regulations for shipping transuranic waste. Because remaining drums are now considered to have the potential to ignite, they evidently no longer pass muster with DOT or the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the Texas official said.
More than 1,400 days have passed “with failure by the DOE to articulate a date certain for removal of the remaining TRU waste,” according to the Baker letter.
He acknowledged the waste left in Texas has not caused any incidents. Nonetheless, the Energy Department continues to assert the drums have potential ignition characteristics and “cannot be moved at this time without further studies and environmental assessments,” Baker wrote.
A July 2018 feasibility study done by Idaho-based Sunsi JV LLC for the Energy Department listed five options for the remaining waste:
- Stabilizing and treating the waste at WCS before recertifying the material and sending it to WIPP;
- Stabilizing the waste on-site, then shipping it to another DOE site for treatment and recertification before sending it to WIPP;
- Sending the drums back to Los Alamos without treatment;
- Moving the material to another commercial facility for pre-WIPP treatment; or
- Shipping the drums straight to WIPP for disposal.
The Energy Department continues to talk with regulators and stakeholders before it makes a final decision, a DOE spokesperson said Thursday by email. “The TRU waste is stored in a safe configuration at WCS until it can be removed.”
