The Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina has completed its 8-gallon pilot shipment of wastewater to a private disposal site in West Texas under the agency’s new interpretation of high-level waste.
The shipment from the Savannah River Defense Waste Processing Facility to Waste Control Specialists (WCS) in Andrew County, Texas, concluded Tuesday, DOE said late last week.
Michael Budney, the head of the department’s Savannah River Site’s operations office, told the facility’s Citizens Advisory Board Monday the shipment had left South Carolina.
Under the reinterpretation, the department says that not all high-level waste poses enough risk to demand disposal in a deep underground repository, such as the stalled Yucca Mountain Project in Nevada.
The DOE says the eight gallons of wastewater from the Savannah River Site vitrification plant is no more radioactive than certain equipment used in hospitals or in the petroleum industry. At WCS the material will be mixed with a concrete-like grout and disposed of as non-high level waste.
Waste Control Specialists was chosen for the pilot shipment in part because it is already licensed to accept Class B low-level radioactive waste.
In August, the DOE issued a finding of no significant impact from the pilot shipment. Eventually, the department could move up to 10,000 gallons of such wastewater from Savannah River to private disposal locations, although it has published no actual plans yet.
The DOE published its re-interpretation of the high-level waste rule in June 2019 after receiving more than 5,000 public comments. The agency said for decades it has managed nearly all reprocessing waste streams as high-level regardless of radioactive risk, and wants to get away from a one-size fits all approach.
Critics of the policy say DOE is merely trying to solve the problem of high-level waste disposal by calling it by a different name.