Waste Control Specialists is seeking leniency from federal regulators after apparently violating its federal waste-storage permit to prevent a possible radiation release in 2014, according to an official account the company filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The 12-page account, the most detailed Waste Control Specialists (WCS) has offered publicly on the situation, is printed on company stationery and dated Oct. 26. The document was not published online until Nov. 23.
“[T]he circumstances which compelled emergency action by WCS were neither foreseeable, nor of WCS’ doing,” company President and CEO Rod Baltzer wrote in the letter to Andrea Kock, deputy director of the NRC Division of Decommissioning, Uranium Recovery, and Waste Programs. “For all of these reasons, WCS requests that NRC favorably consider its request for enforcement discretion and that no formal Notice of Violation be issued or penalty assessed.”
“We are reviewing the 10/26 WCS response to our choice letter and will respond to the licensee in writing when our review is complete” NRC spokeswoman Maureen Conley wrote in a Tuesday email. “We expect to reply before the end of the year.”
Since April 2014, WCS has stored more than 100 barrels of the same kind of improperly packaged transuranic waste that blew open at the underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico in 2014. The waste, which the Energy Department calls inappropriately remediated nitrate salts, is a byproduct of Cold War-era nuclear weapons production at the Los Alamos National Laboratory; the salts were mistakenly packed with organic kitty litter by a DOE subcontractor at Los Alamos.
Organic material can react explosively with nitrate salts, and heat can make such a reaction more likely.
On May 29, 2014, WCS noticed one of the DOE barrels — stored outside at the time — had heated up to 130 degrees Fahrenheit. The company asked the Los Alamos National Laboratory whether there was any temperature limit for the waste. The next day, according to Baltzer’s Oct. 26 letter, the lab replied that if a barrel of waste exceeded 130 degrees Fahrenheit, it should be cooled off.
Ultimately, WCS in June 2014 moved 73 containers of the nitrate-salt waste into its Federal Waste Facility from a pad outside the nearby Treatment, Storage and Disposal Facility building. The company made the move even though it was not allowed under a 2009 NRC order that allowed WCS to accept waste such as the Los Alamos nitrate salts.
“WCS managers had legitimate public health and safety concerns that delaying further could result in missing a possible window to prevent an uncontrolled release similar to what had already occurred with the same material at the WIPP,” Baltzer wrote.”
