Months before a state regulatory deadline, the Energy Department and its prime contractor at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant have stopped using emergency above-ground waste storage space at the mine, according to a Monday regulatory filing.
“On February 9, 2017, [DOE and Nuclear Waste Partnership] reconfigured the TRU [transuranic] mixed waste in storage in the Waste Handling Building such that TRU mixed waste has been removed from the CH Bay Surge Storage Area,” the agency and its partner wrote in a March 20 report to the New Mexico Environment Department.
A DOE spokesperson confirmed the agency was no longer using surge storage. A New Mexico Environment Department spokesperson said the agency had received DOE notification, but that the state does not conduct site inspections to verify the truth of every regulatory filing the moment the filing arrives.
The Waste Handling Building is a way station where transuranic waste shipped to New Mexico from across the DOE complex is prepped for underground disposal at WIPP. About a third of the building’s 135 cubic meters of waste storage space for so-called contact-handled transuranic waste is reserved for what is known as “surge storage”: space that may only be used during emergencies such as the roughly three-year WIPP shutdown that formally ended in December.
The mine closed in 2014 after an accidental underground radiation release and earlier, unrelated fire. After the accidents, DOE placed some transuranic waste in the surge storage area; as a condition of reopening WIPP, New Mexico told DOE and NWP they could only use that space in the Waste Handling Building through June 30.
DOE expects to resume shipping waste to WIPP in April, after clearing out the waste stranded above-ground following the 2014 accidents. Some 130 shipments are slated to be shipped to the facility from April through January.
DOE is still deciding which locations will be first to ship, though Todd Shrader, manager of the agency’s Carlsbad Field Office, has said it will be one of three sites: privately operated Waste Control Specialists in Andrews, Texas; DOE’s Idaho Site; or the agency’s Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C.
The Oak Ridge Site near Oak Ridge, Tenn., and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M., would ship some time after the first three put waste on the road, Shrader said.
Los Alamos, which was responsible for the improperly packaged waste container that leaked radiation into WIPP, has been grinding out progress cleaning up barrels of the same potentially explosive waste still stored at the weapons lab.
According to a report published this week by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, Los Alamos prime contractor Los Alamos National Security in late February finished a contractor readiness review of the inappropriately remediated nitrate salts now stored at the lab’s Area G transuranic waste processing facility.
The contractor practiced loading nitrate salt waste onto a truck for transport to the nearby Waste Characterization, Reduction, and Repackaging Facility, where it would ultimately be repackaged to meet WIPP’s strict new waste acceptance criteria.
Among other things, the new waste acceptance criteria forbid oxidizing chemicals that could start fires. Nitrate salts and the organic cat litter with which some of the nitrate salts now are packaged are an oxidizing combination.
After the contractor readiness review, DOE must perform its own agency readiness review. When that is done, the contractor would be cleared to begin treating the waste.
A DOE spokesperson on Thursday declined to comment about whether DOE had completed its agency review yet.
