Radwaste Solutions

The Government Accountability Office has recommended that the Department of Energy put a hold on construction of its High-Level Waste Facility at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash. The GAO said design and construction of the facility, part of Hanford’s Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant, also known as the Vit Plant, should be paused until several actions are taken, including considering other alternatives for managing the site’s high-level radioactive liquid waste.

President Biden has announced the appointment of six new members to the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, an independent federal agency that evaluates the technical and scientific validity of the Department of Energy’s activities related to managing and disposing of high-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is soliciting public comment on the agency’s guidance for addressing discrete radioactive particle (DRP) contamination resulting from the decontamination and decommissioning of nuclear facilities. According to the NRC, the draft guidance is intended to avoid any inconsistencies in how the agency approaches DRP contamination.

WM Symposia Inc., the nonprofit organization that hosts the annual Waste Management Conference in Phoenix, Ariz., has launched a new initiative dedicated to supporting educators in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

U.S. Reps. Mike Levin (D., Calif.) and August Pfluger (R., Texas) have introduced the bipartisan Nuclear Waste Administration Act of 2024, which would establish an independent agency to manage the country’s nuclear waste.

In addition to establishing a new, single-purpose administration to manage the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle, the bill would direct a consent-based siting process for nuclear waste facilities and ensure reliable funding for managing nuclear waste by providing access to the Nuclear Waste Fund. According to Pfluger and Levin, the bill’s provisions are in line with recommendations from the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future.

Heinrich

Cruz

U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and Martin Heinrich (D., N.M.) introduced a bill that would require the Department of Energy and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to create an independent committee of experts to study new technologies and opportunities for recycling the country’s inventory of spent nuclear fuel.

Introduced on September 24, the Advancing Research in Nuclear Fuel Recycling Act calls for a DOE-commissioned study evaluating the costs, benefits, and risks—including proliferation—of recycling U.S. spent nuclear fuel into usable fuels for commercial and advanced reactors, as well as for other nonreactor applications, including medical, space, industrial, and advanced battery applications.

Workers with the Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM) and its contractor UCOR have finished installing the first of three large sludge-settling tanks for the Mercury Treatment Facility at the site’s Y-12 National Security Complex. The tanks, each of which will be 38 feet tall and 15 feet wide with a capacity of 36,000 gallons, provide a visible sign of ongoing progress on the facility where much of the construction has so far been below ground.

Regardless of who is sitting in the Oval Office next year, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management needs to take a close look at itself and “launch a comprehensive review of all aspects of the EM program,” according to a new report from the Energy Communities Alliance, which represents communities adjacent to or near DOE nuclear cleanup sites.

The 18-page ECA transition paper, Ensuring Long-Term Success: Recommendations for the Next Administration on the U.S. Department of Energy’s Environmental Management Mission, calls on the next administration to “take a fundamental look” at DOE-EM’s entire cleanup effort, including both sites that are active and those where work has been completed. How DOE-EM integrates with other DOE programs, including the National Nuclear Security Administration and the offices of Nuclear Energy, Science, and Legacy Management, should also be examined, according to the paper.

On July 28, 2023, the Department of Energy launched its Cleanup to Clean Energy initiative, an effort to repurpose underutilized DOE-owned property—portions of which were previously used in the nation’s nuclear weapons program—into the sites of clean-energy generation.

Workers with the Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management’s contractor Central Plateau Cleanup Company recently demolished a former chemical storage area at the Reduction Oxidation Plant, one of five former plutonium production facilities at the Hanford Site.

As the Department of Energy embarks on its consent-based process for siting a geologic repository for spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste, a new report from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University SIPA highlights relevant lessons from the federal government’s now defunct Office of the Nuclear Waste Negotiator.

Established under Title IV of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the office, an independent agency within the executive branch, was primarily active from 1990 to 1995. Its role was to engage with state and tribal governments to find an acceptable and suitable host site for a repository.

The full report, Lessons from the Nuclear Waste Negotiator Era of the 1990s for Today’s Consent-Based Siting Efforts, is now available online. Its executive summary is available here.

Juno Beach, Fla.–based NextEra Energy Resources Development has been selected to enter realty negotiations for a large-scale solar electricity generation project at the DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in southeastern New Mexico as part of the department’s Cleanup to Clean Energy initiative.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced yesterday that waste processing operations have resumed at the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) at the Idaho National Laboratory Site. The resumption of operations follows the completion of two maintenance campaigns at the radioactive liquid waste treatment facility.

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) expressed its confidence in the decommissioning work taking place at the damaged Three Mile Island Unit 2 during a recent meeting of the TMI-2 Community Advisory Panel (CAP). “We cannot be more pleased with the progress being made,” said Dwight Shearer, director of the DEP, during the meeting, held on September 13 in Middleton, Pa.

According to the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management, two contractors at its Hanford Site in Washington state have finished a first-time relay of test glass as the site prepares to vitrify—or immobilize in glass—millions of gallons of radioactive and chemical waste from its large underground tanks.

Video: Watch an “instant replay” of the test glass relay here.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has found that Japan’s planned approach for recycling and disposing of soil and radioactive waste from decontamination activities after the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident is consistent with the agency’s safety standards.

The Energy Communities Alliance (ECA), which advocates for communities adjacent to or impacted by Department of Energy sites, is asking the department to conduct an independent analysis evaluating the impacts of delaying the implementation of its statutory interpretation of high-level radioactive waste, which holds that some waste from the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel may be classified as non-HLW.

Tokyo Electric Power Company has added an English-language version of its Fuel Debris Portal Site to its website. According to the company, the portal is intended to deliver information pertaining to melted nuclear fuel debris at the Fukushima Daiichi site to the public in an easy-to-understand manner.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management will begin using drones for the first time to internally inspect radioactive liquid waste tanks at the department’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Inspections were previously done using magnetic wall-crawling robots.

Finland’s waste management organization Posiva announced that it has begun a trial run of placing spent fuel canisters in the Onkalo geologic repository, which is located near the Olkiluoto nuclear power plant in southwestern Finland. No spent fuel will be disposed of during the trial run, which is expected to last several months.