Transuranic waste from the Savannah River Site (SRS) will not be certified for shipment to New Mexico for permanent disposal until at least March, the top Department of Energy official at the South Carolina facility told a citizens group this week.
Earlier this year, DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office released stricter new standards for packaging and shipping radioactively contaminated material and equipment known as transuranic waste to the underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. — the only disposal facility for such material in the country.
Any DOE defense nuclear site that creates, or has in the past created, transuranic waste must certify its shipping and handling methods comply with these new standards, which are known officially as waste acceptance criteria.
“The SRS recertification is scheduled to begin in March 2017,” Jack Craig, DOE’s site manager for SRS, said Tuesday in prepared remarks to the agency-chartered SRS Citizens Advisory Board.
Depending on how long the certification process takes to complete, that would put SRS on track to resume shipping transuranic around the same time WIPP is projected to start accepting such material again; the deep underground salt mine has been closed to shipments since February 2014, following an accidental radiation release and unrelated underground fire that month.
According to timelines the agency and prime WIPP contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership have provided in public over the summer, the mine should be ready to accept new waste shipments by April. However, DOE has not yet said which sites will be first in the queue to send their waste to WIPP.
