Waste Control Specialists will retain custody of transuranic waste generated at the Los Alamos National Laboratory under a recently extended contract with Nuclear Waste Partnership: the Energy Department’s prime contractor for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
A DOE spokesperson confirmed the contract status Wednesday, but the agency declined to discuss the terms of the extension. Waste Control Specialists (WCS) and Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) likewise declined to discuss terms. A source familiar with the deal said the extension covered six months of storage at WCS’ Andrews County, Texas, facility.
The contract is not, as reported in Weapons Complex Morning Briefing this week, a new agreement with the Department of Energy. The current contract was slated to expire March 31 and was worth roughly $25 million over three years, including options.
In what is known as a pass-through arrangement, DOE provides the funding for WCS’ storage costs for this waste cache, which the company then receives under its contract with NWP. That is according to Phil Breidenbach, president and project manager for Nuclear Waste Partnership. In early March, Breidenbach told Weapons Complex Monitor the company did not want to renew its contract with Waste Control Specialists.
WCS has stored more than 100 barrels of Los Alamos transuranic waste since 2014. Its Andrews County facility is regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has given the company permission to store the waste through 2018.
Some of the Los Alamos waste at WCS is substantially identical to the improperly packaged waste that exploded underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in February 2014 and shut the mine down for nearly three years. DOE blamed the underground radiation release on nitrate salts that were mistakenly packaged with organic cat litter at Los Alamos by a DOE subcontractor. The litter, used to absorb moisture, reacted with the salts to create oxygen and heat, which led to the explosion.
The Department of Energy wants to ship some of the Los Alamos waste at WCS to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant for disposal before the end of the year. It will initially be limited to shipping containers that contain no oxidizing chemicals, such as the organic cat litter; the mine’s strict new waste acceptance criteria prohibits such chemicals from the underground.
DOE has informally proposed treating problematic waste at WCS with a mobile waste treatment system, but the agency has not said how much this technology would cost, or who will build it.
Waste shipments to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant resumed last week with a 2-cubic-meter shipment that left DOE’s Idaho Site April 6 and arrived at the mine early Monday morning, according to the Idaho Post Register newspaper and a source in New Mexico.
