With limited room at WIPP, feds urged to study expansion Santa Fe New Mexican | September 5, 2017
At 52 percent of capacity, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad will be filled up before all of the transuranic waste intended for permanent disposal at the site can be buried
there.
A U.S. Government Accountability Office report released Tuesday outlines the need for the U.S. Energy Department to study regulatory steps and financial costs associated with expanding WIPP. But this expansion could also pave the way for WIPP in the future to
accept more dangerous, high-level nuclear waste, which is currently prohibited by law. The report says WIPP, the only permanent disposal site for any form of nuclear waste, does not have enough space for all of the transuranic waste — tools, clothes, soil and other material contaminated with plutonium and other radioactive elements — generated to date by the Energy Department’s defense
missions.
ENVIRONMENTAL CLEANUPHanford will miss deadline to tear down plutonium-contaminated
plant Tri-City Herald | September 2, 2017
Hanford’s Plutonium Finishing Plant will not be torn down by the legal deadline at the end of September.
The Department of Energy notified its regulators — the
Washington State Department of Ecology and the Environmental Protection Agency — on Friday that the deadline could not be met.
But the end remains in sight after two decades of work on cleanup of a plant left highly radioactively contaminated after 40 years of service to the nation.
STORAGE & DISPOSITION
NUCLEAR
ENERGY |
Sept 30 FY 2017 ends
Oct 1 FY 2018 begins |
|
|
|