The Department of Energy has extended the public comment period by 45 days for the new 2.2-million-cubic yard waste disposal facility at the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee. Comments are now being accepted through Dec. 10.
The department has also postponed a public hearing on the landfill, which had been scheduled for Oct. 18, until Nov. 7. A public notice did not state a reason for rescheduling the hearing.
The new disposal site would replace the current Environmental Management Waste Management Facility (EMWMF), which began receiving waste in 2002 and is expected to reach capacity by the mid-2020s. It has mostly taken in soil and material from demolished buildings at the East Tennessee Technology Park (ETTP), formerly known as the K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant, which conducted uranium enrichment from the 1940s until the 1980s.
The new Environmental Management Disposal Facility would, like the current landfill, be located in the Bear Creek Valley at Oak Ridge. The site would take low-level radioactive waste, mixed low-level waste, and chemical waste resulting from cleanup of the Y-12 National Security Complex, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and ETTP, where remediation is nearly complete.
The life-cycle cost of the project, from site preparation through decades of operation and finally to closure, is currently estimated in the range of $732 million to $928 million. The Energy Department has said it hopes to obtain regulatory approval for the new landfill in 2019 and open the new facility in the early 2020s. The facility will be regulated by the state of Tennessee and the U.S Environmental Protection Agency.
Public comments can be emailed to [email protected].
The Energy Department’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is expected to make four more shipments of transuranic waste to DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in the near term, after having just revived shipments from LANL’s Area G.
A weekly report dated Sept. 28 from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) indicated that LANL’s environmental management contractor, Newport News Nuclear BWXT-Los Alamos (N3B), hopes to move a total of five shipments from by the end of November.
The board noted that DNFSB staff had finished a contractor readiness assessment of loading work at Area G, which subsequently sent a shipment to WIPP on Oct. 4. Area G is where the lab placed its transuranic (TRU) waste prior to WIPP’s opening in 1999.
A TRU waste shipment from LANL to WIPP was expected to take place during the second week of October was delayed due to weather, said a DOE representative, who believes the second Los Alamos shipment was also coming out of Area G.
