Transuranic waste generators were for years estimating the weight of their payloads instead of weighing them out, so the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico has temporarily stopped taking shipments with dunnage — material used to fill out shipping containers, according to a federal report.
The practice is widespread across DOE, according to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB), and even though it might result in shipments that are lighter than their listed weight, waste generators wound up in trouble because they did not do things strictly by the book, the board wrote in several recent reports.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulates nuclear-waste shipping containers, including TRUPACT-II and HalfPACT rigs used to move waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). The Commission’s certificates of compliance for these containers require shippers to weigh out the containers, the waste and the dunnage, a spokesperson for the Commission wrote Tuesday in an email.
“There is no safety issue, and no overweight packages were shipped,” David McIntyre, a spokesperson for the Commission, wrote. “The issue is that they didn’t calculate the weights the way they were required to in the Certificates of Compliance for these two packages,” McIntyre wrote.
WIPP Prime Nuclear Waste Partnership found generator sites were calculating overpack weights by picking a nominal weight value archived in the DOE’s Waste Data System software and adding 5% to that value.
WIPP, which tipped off the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, is now doing “an extent of condition review,” according to a DNFSB staff report dated June 4 and recently posted online.
The Idaho National Laboratory, one of the shippers out of compliance, will for now ship full payloads without dunnage, according to a second DNFSB staff report also dated June 4. Contractor Fluor Idaho has enough containers with full payloads to ship for four-to-six more weeks, the board report said.
WIPP did not immediately reply to a request for comment by press time.