Nuclear waste permit being modified. How much will it cost?

Editor's note: This article was updated April 23 to reflect a correction in the affiliation of Joni Arends. Arends is a member of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety.

Nuclear waste managers could not financially justify proposed changes in how the materials are handled for disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Repository, during a public hearing Wednesday in Carlsbad.

Attendees at the meeting sought cost-benefit information for two permit modification requests (PMRs) the U.S. Department of Energy planned to submit to the State of New Mexico, but officials with the DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office (CBFO) and WIPP operations contractor Salado Isolation Mining Contractors (SIMCO) did not include that information in the presentation nor were able to provide it when asked.

The meeting was held on two PMRs: one to allow WIPP to use four new types of shielded containers to emplace higher-level, remoted handled (RH) waste as lower-level contact handled (CH) waste, and another to allow the DOE to reduce the number of required audits at three facilities that ship the least waste to WIPP.

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Transuranic (TRU) nuclear waste is sent from across the country to the WIPP site for disposal in a 2,000-foot-deep underground salt deposit, mostly made up of clothing, equipment and other materials irradiated during federal nuclear activities.

Most of it comes from Idaho National Laboratory, Savannah River Site in South Carolina and Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the DOE proposed a policy it said would help the agency focus its oversight on the higher-shipment facilities.

Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco and Sandia National Laboratories were some of the lowest-shipping sites, and Michael Gerle with the CBFO said during the meeting that cost savings would be made by reducing travel expenses required to audit these sites every year.

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“When you send someone goes out for audits on those sites, the cost savings would be you don’t send eight people to Lawrence Livermore every single year,” Gerle said. “We could focus our resources on other areas where we perceive there to be more need.”

But when pressed by attendees, DOE officials could not give an exact dollar amount that would be saved for that PMR or the one to permit additional shielded containers for RH waste disposal, as opposed to the old method of emplacing cannisters in boreholes on the walls of the repository, which wasn’t used since 2014, Chavez said.

“I don’t have cost data. I don’t have any of that. I don’t know,” said Rick Chavez, an official with SIMCO.

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Without that information, attendees – many frequent critics of the WIPP project – said they could not understand the DOE’s rationale for the changes, not provide adequate public comments by the June 1 deadline.

Carlsbad resident Norbert Rempe said the DOE should report on how it would save public dollars, should the New Mexico Environment Department accept the proposals.

“It would greatly help if you could give us an idea, you’re going to save taxpayer money. Any sort of statement of such is completely useless without a quantification,” Rempe said. “Give us some idea of how much good this does for the taxpayer.”

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Initially, the PMR allowed the DOE to consider auditing any site every three years instead of annually, but Gerle said the agency “pulled back” after receiving feedback to first try every other year at the chosen sites. He said the “graded approach” works it may be used for other waste-generating facilities in the future.

“It’s better than doing audits at every one of those sites every year. It gives us some efficiency. Not as much as we initially thought, but it gives some efficiently,” Chavez said. “We’ll still go through the criteria of if those three sites need to be audited every other year.”

Joni Arends with Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety said the DOE should also include analysis of the impact the new containers will have on climate change, as they will be made of steel and lead and be left underground containing the waste as its buried by collapsing salt.

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“I’ve been told today there’s no cost analysis, there’s not climate change analysis in using the shielded containers instead of the boreholes,” Arends said. “Every time with have these meetings we find out more about money being spent without the public’s consent and no justification.”

Chavez said the use of the additional containers would give WIPP more options in handling RH waste as it could increase shipments of such waste in the future.

“Any way we can deplete the inventory of waste is significant. This is another option,” Chavez said. “We still plan to use cannisters and borehole emplacement. This is another option we’re providing to the generator sites.”

Adrian Hedden can be reached at 575-628-5516, achedden@currentargus.com or @AdrianHedden on the social media platform X.

This article originally appeared on Carlsbad Current-Argus: WIPP officials look to alter nuke waste permit at site near Carlsbad