Remote-Handled Waste:  Permit and Disposition Activities

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) disposes of the nation's defense-related transuranic radioactive waste.  Located near Carlsbad, New Mexico, WIPP is a U.S. Department of Energy facility managed by Washington TRU Solutions, and began disposal operations in March 1999.

Work toward opening the WIPP facility began much earlier though, including completion of an environmental impact statement on the site in 1980 and the federal WIPP Land Withdrawal Act in 1992.  The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approved the disposal of remote-handled transuranic (RH-TRU) waste at WIPP in 2004.  The New Mexico Environmental Department (NMED) agreed to a revised permit for this purpose in 2006, after several years of negotiations and public hearings to bring a variety of stakeholder groups to the table for consensus.  

RH-TRU waste, like the contact-handled (CH) TRU waste accepted at WIPP, is made up of solid-form objects and soil contaminated with radioactive elements whose atomic numbers are greater than uranium.  Although RH produces a higher dose rate than CH, which requires it be handled remotely, the two have the same dose rate limits when in transport.  RH shipments meet these limit by using shipping casks with additional lead shielding.

Before any RH-TRU waste is shipped to WIPP, the EPA and NMED must approve the shipping site’s procedures for characterization (physical and chemical characteristics of the waste) to ensure it is suitable and approved for disposal at WIPP.

As of early October, 2007, more than 6,100 shipments of TRU waste had been transported to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant - all without any form of radioactive release to the environment.  The vast majority of shipments arrived from Idaho National Laboratory and Rocky Flats, a now closed former-nuclear weapons complex site in Colorado. 

DOE has emplaced more than 51,000 cubic meters of CH waste in the salt bed 2,150 feet underground at WIPP, and more than 20 cubic meters of RH waste - the first shipment of which came in January 2007.  The total volume stipulated in the land withdrawal act is 175,570 cubic meters, only about four percent of that is expected to be RH waste.

Source: WIPP website documents