By Mike Butler, Oakridger
The Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM) has met its goal to complete eight shipments of transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico for permanent disposal by Sept. 30, further reducing its inventory of the material.
Transuranic waste consists of manufactured radioactive elements heavier than uranium on the periodic table. In Oak Ridge, this waste was generated from decades of research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Employees at Oak Ridge’s Transuranic Waste Processing Center treat and package the waste destined for WIPP. This fiscal year’s shipments removed 232 drums from storage as OREM and contractor UCOR steadily work to eliminate the entire inventory of legacy transuranic waste from the site.
To date, crews have processed 98% of the lower-contaminated contact-handled transuranic waste at Oak Ridge and shipped 94% of it for disposal. They have also processed approximately 98% of the higher-contaminated remote-handled waste and shipped 80% of it.
Patrick Rapp, UCOR’s Transuranic Waste Processing Center area program manager, said this year’s shipments were timed to coincide with the completion of a WIPP maintenance outage that ended in March.
The shipments were orchestrated in collaboration with the Central Characterization Project, which has specialists deployed at the Transuranic Waste Processing Center whose expertise ensures all WIPP-bound shipments meet stringent safety protocols and regulatory compliance standards.
“It is imperative that we work together in planning waste processing and waste characterization,” said Evan Desjardins, Central Characterization Project ORNL project manager. “The ultimate goal is to have transuranic waste shipped out of Tennessee, and TWPC and CCP work closely together to accomplish that.”
Mike Butler is a member of the UCOR communications staff.
This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Goal met: More transuranic waste from Oak Ridge shipped to Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in NM
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