The Department of Energy should reclassify treated liquid waste stored in glass logs at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., so the material will be eligible for disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, N.M., the SRS Citizens Advisory Board (CAB) recommended Tuesday.
The recommendation, approved in a 19-2 vote, asks the Energy Department to recharacterize the material as transuranic (TRU) waste, material with atomic numbers higher than uranium in the period table of elements, produced during activities such as processing of spent reactor fuel or nuclear weapons production. Under federal law, WIPP can only be used for disposal of this waste type.
The Savannah River Site material is currently classified as high-level waste due to its origin rather than its “physical characteristics or health and environmental impacts related to this waste,” according to the CAB. The material dates to the beginning in 1996 of liquid waste processing operations at the site, where in the absence of a new approach it will stay until a permanent federal repository is built.
With Tuesday’s vote, the CAB is requesting that DOE and WIPP determine regulatory and safety actions needed to recharacterize the waste. Also, a tentative schedule should be drawn up for this process, the board said.
The recommendation was crafted by CAB member Dawn Gillas, who spent 15 years at SRS before retiring in 2012 from her role as a senior technical adviser for the Used Nuclear Fuel Management Program. Gillas said shipping the waste would benefit both communities: Locals near the Savannah River Site want to get as rid of as much of its waste as possible, while a new waste stream for WIPP means more job opportunities in the Carlsbad area.
CAB members Susan Corbett and Mary Weber voted against the recommendation. Corbett said only a small percentage of the New Mexico population wants this material sent to WIPP, and that the necessary regulatory red tape and safety measures would become too expensive and time consuming.
Passage of the recommendation now puts the decision in the hands of the Energy Department.
A separate CAB recommendation, approved Tuesday in a 20-1 vote, would accelerate transuranic waste shipments from SRS to the New Mexico facility.
The Savannah River Site housed more than 15,000 cubic meters of transuranic waste when shipments to WIPP began in 2001, and now stores less than 600 cubic meters of the material. The material was produced through spent fuel recycling at Savannah River, along with use of plutonium in production of nuclear weapons.
Shipments were routine until WIPP was closed for nearly three years by a vehicle fire and subsequent, unrelated radiation release in February 2014. Waste shipments from the Savannah River Site and other DOE facilities resumed in April 2017.
During the three-year shutdown, the Savannah River Site began diluting 6 metric tons of nuclear weapon-usable plutonium into a form that can eventually be sent to WIPP. The CAB worries the downblending campaign is limiting the site’s capacity to ship TRU waste to New Mexico, saying plutonium shipments could ultimately take precedence over transuranic waste removal.
Savannah River sent nine waste shipments to WIPP in 2017, but none of the 10 shipments planned for this year have gone to New Mexico yet. The first shipment of 2018 should arrive at WIPP in the next month or so, followed shortly by a second shipment, Jim Folk, DOE assistant manager for waste disposition at Savannah River, told the CAB on Monday.
The site has about 115 shipments left, but Folk said SRS has taken a back seat to the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and other sites since WIPP reopened. “Some of that is based on regulatory requirements so shipping theirs is more of a high-priority than SRS,” he said.
About 16 kilograms of the plutonium, or 0.016 metric tons, had been downblended at SRS by August 2017, when operations were suspended for planned safety examinations at the facility in the site’s K Area, where the plutonium is processed and then stored. The Energy Department resumed the mission in March and expects to downblend 30 kilograms through this fiscal year.
The mission is expected to be completed in fiscal 2046. It is unclear when this material will start going to WIPP, but the advisory board said in the recommendation downblending “will generate a very large number of shipments that will be ready for shipment in the near future. If the number of shipments from SRS to WIPP are not significantly increased in the near future this inventory will grow at SRS.”
Finally, the CAB voted 20-1 in favor of a spent fuel exchange between SRS and the Idaho National Laboratory. Savannah River can process aluminum-based spent nuclear fuel, but it does not have that same ability to process the non-aluminum material it houses. Meanwhile, the Idaho lab can process its non-aluminum material, but not the other material. Overall, SRS stores about 2,700 bundles of spent nuclear fuel, but did not provide a breakdown of how much of each type is on-site.
The Energy Department in 1995 considered an exchange program that would send each facility stockpiles of the material it can process, but the program was put on hold in 2001. The CAB wants to reopen that program to further rid the site of nuclear materials and waste.
Corbett also voted against the other two recommendations. The Energy Department will now consider all three CAB proposals. They can be granted in full, in part, or not at all.
