Review of the Department of Energy's Plans for Disposal of Surplus Plutonium in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (2020) / Chapter Skim
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Appendix H: Interim Report
Appendix H: Interim Report
Pages 154-212
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From page 154... ...
Appendix H Interim Report Disposal of Surplus Plutonium at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Interim Report Committee on Disposal of Surplus Plutonium at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board Division on Earth and Life Studies A Consensus Study Report of 154
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From page 155... ...
, for planning and coordinating the committee's site visit and tours at SRS, South Carolina; William Goodrum, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) , for planning and coordinating the committee's visit and tour at LANL, New Mexico; and Todd Shrader, CBFO manager, and George Basabilvazo, CBFO chief scientist, for planning and organizaing the committee's visit and tour at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and the public session in Carlsbad, New Mexico.
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From page 156... ...
Review of DOE's Plans for Disposal of Surplus Plutonium in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Reviewer Acknowledgments This Consensus Study Report was reviewed in draft form by individuals chosen for their diverse perspectives and technical expertise. The purpose of this independent review is to provide candid and critical comments that will assist the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in making each published report as sound as possible and to ensure that it meets the institutional standards for quality, objectivity, evidence, and responsiveness to the study charge.
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176 3.1 Availability of WIPP for Disposal of 34 MT of Diluted Plutonium, 177 3.2 Unclear Strategy for Development of the NEPA Environmental Impact Statement, 184 3.3 Dilute and Dispose Is Not an Approved Method for Eliminating Surplus Plutonium in the PMDA, 187 3.4 Assessment of Conceptual Plans and Public Outreach, 189 3.5 Questions for DOE-NNSA, 192 REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................................
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conceptual plans for disposing of 34 metric tons (MT) of surplus plutonium 4 in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP)
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in New Mexico, where the plutonium metal will be oxidized; Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina, where the oxidized plutonium will be diluted and packaged for transport and disposal; and WIPP in New Mexico, where the diluted plutonium will be emplaced in the repository.
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• Lack of Russian Federation approval for dispositioning 34 MT of surplus plutonium using the dilute and dispose process to meet the requirements of the PMDA. RECOMMENDATION 1: The remaining statutory capacity as defined in the Waste Isolation Pilot Land Withdrawal Act (P.L.
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From page 161... ...
RECOMMENDATION 3: If the dilute and dispose option becomes the program of record, the committee strongly suggests that DOE consider re-initiating the Environmental Evaluation Group, as an independent technical review organization that can represent the concerns of the state of New Mexico, throughout the lifetime of the dilute and dispose program. Members of the technical review organization would need to be technically qualified to address the health and safety issues and a subset would need to have clearances or access authorizations that will allow thorough review of classified plans as they evolve and provide assessments of the dilute and dispose process.
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: How many and what kinds of environmental impact statements are currently associated with the dilute and dispose program? Which ones will need to be updated?
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Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration's (DOE-NNSA's) conceptual plans for disposing of surplus plutonium in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP)
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The committee's assessment for this Interim Report is a highlevel review of the proposed diluted and dispose process, current WIPP capacity, and requirements of the PMDA. The second report, to be issued at the conclusion of the study, will address the entire Statement of Task (Box 1-1)
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From page 165... ...
Both of the PMDA surplus plutonium disposition options listed above, incorporation into MOX fuel followed by irradiation or immobilization with high-level radioactive waste, meet a set of criteria developed by a National Academy of Sciences committee in 1994 and commonly known as the "spent fuel standard" (NAS 1994)
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7 The United States began construction of a facility to manufacture MOX fuel, the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility ("MOX Plant") , at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina in 2007.
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Supplemental EIS. In April 2016, a Record of Decision was issued announcing the DOE's decision to dilute and dispose of the 6 MT of non-pit plutonium at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
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. 9 The term "transuranic waste" is defined in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Withdrawal Act as "waste containing more than 100 nanocuries of alpha-emitting transuranic isotopes per gram of waste, with half-lives greater than 20 years, except for -- (A)
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From page 169... ...
and shipped via OST to the Savannah River Site for further processing. Non-Pit Oxide Production indicates a total of 7.8 MT of non-pit plutonium that is stored in different DOE sites; a portion of the non-pit plutonium is oxidized and will be sent directly to the Savannah River Site for further processing, the remaining portion of non-pit plutonium will be shipped first to Los Alamos National Laboratory to be oxidized before being shipped to and processed at the SRS.
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170 FIGURE 2-3a Block diagram of the "Dilute and Processing" and "Geological Repository Disposal" steps shown in Figure 2-2, beginning with receipt of the oxidized plutonium at the Savannah River Site (Receipt and Verification of the PuO2 [plutonium oxide] Packages)
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From page 171... ...
26 The DOE OST 27 will be responsible for shipping undiluted plutonium materials from the Pantex Plant to Los Alamos and from Los Alamos to Savannah River following safety, security, and safeguarding protocols that have been in use for many decades. The packaged diluted plutonium waste will be shipped from Savannah River to the WIPP site by DOE-EM using existing TRU waste shipping casks and resources.
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Panels One through Six have been closed. Panels Seven and Eight will continue to accept TRU waste although Panel Seven has been radiologically contaminated due to an exploding waste drum in 2014.
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The program is also referred to as "downblend and dispose" in the text below. FY 2015 In the Explanatory Statement for the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2015, Congress requested a comparison of life-cycle cost estimates: "NNSA is directed to submit to the Committees on Appropriations of the House of Representatives and the Senate not later than 120 days after enactment of this Act an independently-verified lifecycle cost estimate for the option to complete construction and operate the MOX facility and the option to downblend and dispose of the material in a repository."a FY 2016 Congress approved use of $5 million to the conceptual design of dilute and dispose option In the Explanatory Statement for the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016, Congress approved use of $5 million to the conceptual design of dilute and dispose option: "[T]
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: (i) an alternative option for carrying out the plutonium disposition program for the same amount of plutonium as the amount of plutonium intended to be disposed of in the MOX facility exists, meeting the requirements of the Business Operating Procedure of the National Nuclear Security Administration entitled ‘‘Analysis of Alterna tives'' and dated March 14, 2016 (BOP–03.07)
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, life-cycle cost estimate (which contains scheduling and program planning details) , and the Notice of Intent.
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. The committee agrees with earlier assessments that the technical complexity of the dilute and dispose process is lower than that of the construction of a MOX fuel option.
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3.1 AVAILABILITY OF WIPP FOR DISPOSAL OF 34 MT OF DILUTED PLUTONIUM DOE-NNSA asserts that the intent of the PMDA to disposition 34 MT of surplus plutonium cannot be met without both diluting this material and disposing of by emplacing it in a deep geological repository such as WIPP. Access to WIPP's capacity is an essential and critical requirement for the success of DOENNSA's conceptual plans (see Section 3.3 for further analysis and discussion on the relative barriers of the 3 An updated version of the Surplus Plutonium Disposition System Plan has been created but has not yet been shared with the committee.
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From page 178... ...
Extending the end date of WIPP to 2050 or later requiring a permit modification. Some of these actions may be required for future TRU waste streams absent the disposal of 34 MT of diluted plutonium; regardless, the approval of the permits is necessary for DOE-NNSA's conceptual plan.
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WIPP's disposal capacity is defined by the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Land Withdrawal Act to be 6.2 million ft3 (175,564 m3) of defense-generated TRU waste.
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From page 180... ...
This analysis includes additional potential sources of TRU waste not shown in the 2017 Inventory Report. The committee estimate shows that: • An estimated 156,000 m3 of emplaced and WIPP-bound waste will be disposed of in WIPP from current and planned DOE-site cleanup activities through 2050 (LANL 2017)
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DOE proposes to create a "Land Withdrawal Act TRU Waste Volume of Record" to refer to the volume of TRU waste inside a disposal container. The permit modification request proposes to track the "LWA TRU Waste Volume of Record" separately from the NMED Permit "TRU Mixed Waste Volume." DOE notes in the permit request that the volume of emplaced contact-handled TRU (CH-TRU)
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. RECOMMENDATION 1: The remaining statutory capacity as defined in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Land Withdrawal Act (P.L.
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17 FINDING 3: Shifting the plutonium disposition program of record to the dilute and dispose option will require detailed discussions between DOE and the states of New Mexico and South Carolina. Accommodating 34 MT of diluted plutonium and other planned and/or potential future DOE waste streams in WIPP will necessitate changes to state permits and possibly legislation requiring state cooperation including public participation.
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From page 184... ...
In 2015, dilute and dispose was specifically considered as one of the disposition options for non-pit surplus plutonium (referred to as "WIPP Disposal") in the Final Surplus Plutonium Disposition Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (DOE 2016c)
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immobilization … and … MOX fuel. The De partment has selected the Savannah River Site in South Carolina as the location for all three disposition facilities." (DOE 2000, p.
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have changed sig nificantly. Additionally, there may be other EISs and RODs tied to the facilities to be used for the DOE-NNSA dilute and dispose process that might also need to be updated or created.
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3.3 DILUTE AND DISPOSE IS NOT AN APPROVED METHOD FOR ELIMINATING SURPLUS PLUTONIUM IN THE PMDA The committee was asked to evaluate the viability of DOE-NNSA's dilute and dispose conceptual plans to support U.S. commitments under the PMDA.
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From page 188... ...
The 1994 committee assessed disposition options for meeting the spent fuel standard that included both chemical and radiological barriers or chemical and substantial physical barriers but does not review a dilute and dispose option as proposed by DOE-NNSA. The PMDA does not reference the 1994 NAS report but the means for dispositioning the surplus plutonium outlined in the agreement, irradiation of MOX fuel in nuclear reactors, met the spent fuel standard.
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From page 189... ...
and the Russian Federation, a renegotiation of the PMDA may not be a reasonable near-term expectation. The committee recognizes that changing United StatesRussian Federation relations may de facto alter the applicability of the PMDA's plutonium disposition criteria to the proposed dilute and dispose method.
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. The dilute and dispose conceptual plans rely on significant permit modifications for WIPP operations to be approved by the State of New Mexico.
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From page 191... ...
RECOMMENDATION 3: If the dilute and dispose option becomes the program of record, the committee strongly suggests that DOE consider reinitiating the Environmental Evaluation Group, as an independent technical review organization that can represent the concerns of the state of New Mexico, throughout the lifetime of the dilute and dispose program. Members of the technical review organization would need to be technically qualified to address the health and safety issues and a subset would need to have clearances or access authorizations that will allow thorough review of classified plans as they evolve and provide assessments of the dilute and dispose process.
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1. WIPP Disposal Capacity: Does DOE-NNSA agree that WIPP's current statutory and physical dis posal capacity is a barrier to implementation of the dilute and dispose process for dispositioning 34 MT of surplus plutonium?
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2018. Disposal of Surplus Plutonium in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
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2017. Plutonium Disposition: Proposed Dilute and Dispose Approach Highlights Need for More Work at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
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Meeting 1: Disposal of Surplus Plutonium in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, Washington, DC. http://dels.nas.edu/resources/static-assets/nrsb/ miscellaneous/WIPP1/McALHANY.pdf (accessed September 10, 2018)
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She served on the Transportation Security Panel for the National Research Council's (NRC) report Making the Nation Safer: The Role of Science and Technology in Countering Terrorism and was on the NRC committee that produced the report Terrorism and the Chemical Infrastructure: Protecting People and Reducing Vulnerabilities as well as several other national committees focusing on transportation risks, including spent fuel.
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Dr. Bronzini has also served as a consultant and advisor to numerous private and public organizations, including the State of Nevada Nuclear Waste Project Office's Technical Review Committee for the proposed radioactive waste repository at Yucca Mountain.
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His previous chemical forensic work at Savannah River Laboratory resulted in an invitation to visit the Russian Tomsk-7 Processing site to aid in the investigation of an accident similar to one that had occurred at Savannah River. Before retirement he was the chief scientist for the U.S.-Russian Plutonium Disposition Program; this played a major role in the US-Russian Agreement for each country to dispose of approximately 35 metric tons of excess weapons-grade plutonium in methods that would prevent their return to a weapons program.
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chemical weapons stockpile and nuclear weapons; chemical waste management; degradation of the U.S. government physical infrastructure; and sustainability and the U.S.
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Prior to working on Yucca Mountain, he managed site characterization programs for a deep geological repository for transuranic waste at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, and developed transportation optimizations for the National Transuranic Waste Management program. With over 25 years of professional experience in nuclear fuel cycle and radioactive waste management for the United States and several international programs, Mr.
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Ottmer is a nationally-recognized expert in nuclear waste transportation safety. She was appointed to her position as Colorado Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP)
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He has extensive experience in programmatic business development and execution with a wide range of government agencies including the Department of Energy (DOE) , the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
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He previously held several positions at the National Academies, including senior board director of the NRSB (2005-2017) , director of the Board on Radioactive Waste Management (1996-2005)
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and Disposal of Surplus Plutonium Betsy Forinash, Director, National Transuranic Waste Program-HQ, DOE-EM 3:45 PM Environmental Protection Agency's Activities Related to the Plutonium Dilute and Dispose Program Thomas Peake, EPA Radiation Protection Division, Director for the Center for Waste Management and Regulations 4:45 PM Opportunity for Public Comment 5:00 PM End Data-Gathering Session 204
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(3) of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, 5 U.S.C.
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(3) of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, 5 U.S.C.
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Dynes, Committee Chair Jennifer (Jenny) Heimberg, Study Director 5:15 PM Perspectives, Concerns, and Questions About DOE Plans to Dilute and Dispose of Surplus Plutonium at WIPP George Anastas, retired, Past President of Health Physics Society 5:45 PM Disposal of Plutonium at WIPP Don Hancock, Southwest Research and Information Center, Director of Nuclear Waste Programs 6:15 PM Perspectives, Concerns, and Questions About DOE Plans to Dilute and Dispose of Surplus Plutonium at WIPP Lokesh Chaturvedi, Ph.D., Independent Consultant 6:45 PM The Role of the Governor's Radioactive Waste Consultation Task Force Ken McQueen, Cabinet Secretary of New Mexico's Energy, Minerals, and Natural Re sources Department 207
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7:30 PM ADJOURN Day One Tuesday, March 13, 2018 DATA-GATHERING SESSION OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Skeen Whitlock Building, Carlsbad, NM 4:00 PM Call to order and welcome • Brief introductions of committee and staff • Review of the meeting agenda and objectives • Overview of the TRANSCOMM and EOC tours Robert (Bob) Dynes, Committee Chair 4:15 PM WIPP Regulatory and Operations Overview Todd Shrader, Manager, Carlsbad Field Office George Basabilvazo, Chief Scientist, Carlsbad Field Office Perspectives, Concerns, and Questions About DOE Plans to Dilute and Dispose of Surplus Plutonium at WIPP 6:00 PM Russell Hardy, Director, Carlsbad Environmental Monitoring & Research Center 6:20 PM John Heaton, Chairman of the Mayor's Nuclear Task Force 6:40 PM Cathrynn Brown, State Representative and Susan Crockett, Eddy County Commissioner 7:00 PM Public Comments The committee will listen to comments from the public.
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From page 209... ...
Contents Virginia Kay, Deputy Director, Office of Material Disposition (NA-233) , Office of Material Management and Minimization, National Nuclear Security Administration, DOE 4:30 PM Public Comments 4:45 PM ADJOURN 209
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Dynes, Committee Chair 12:15 PM Overview of Current Status and Next Steps of the Dilute and Dispose Program Pete Hanlon, Assistant Deputy Administrator, Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation, Na tional Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) 12:45 PM Surplus Plutonium Disposition Program Sachiko McAlhany, Senior Technical Advisor, NA-23 Todd Shrader, Manager, Carlsbad Field Office, DOE-EM Samuel Callahan, Director, Office of Security, AU-50 2:30 PM BREAK in the Foyer DATA-GATHERING SESSION: OPEN TO THE PUBLIC Beckman Center, Board Room 2:40 PM Welcome Robert (Bob)
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(3) of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, 5 U.S.C.
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DATA-GATHERING SESSION NOT OPEN TO THE PUBLIC VTC: DOE-HQ, LLNL, and ORNL 12:00 PM Sachiko McAlhany, National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) 1:45 PM Move to Committee-Only session Robert Dynes, Chair, Committee on the Disposal of Surplus Plutonium 3:30 PM ADJOURN Note: The data-gathering session of this meeting to be held on August 23, 2018, from 12:00 noon to 2:30 PM, EDT, will not be open to the public under Subsection 15(b)
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