Bureaucrats frustrate Hanford scientists | Guest Opinion

The recent dust-up over the “Trump Rule” on Hanford nuclear tank waste is getting a lot of us scientists pretty frustrated. The rule just allows most of the waste to be reclassified to what it actually is. There is almost no high-level waste (HLW) left in the Hanford Tanks and we need to admit this.

First, this has nothing to do with Trump. We in the scientific community have been trying to do this for over a decade. Second, the idea that this would allow clean-up to less stringent standards is absurd, false and a bit deceitful.

I can understand not understanding a complicated subject like nuclear waste. It’s willful ignorance that I can’t forgive.

There are four general categories of nuclear waste in the United States: commercial spent nuclear fuel (SNF), high-level nuclear waste (HLW) from making weapons, transuranic waste (TRU) also from making weapons, and low-level radioactive waste (LLW) from many things like the mining, medical and energy industries. A minor amount of other radioactive wastes are sprinkled among these categories.

SNF is the hottest waste, primarily from two isotopes, Cs-137 and Sr-90, both with approximately 30-year half-lives, making the waste pretty hot for almost 200 years. Similarly for HLW - it’s the Cs-137 and Sr-90 that make it hot, although not so much as SNF. LLW is not very hot at all. TRU waste spans the gamut from low-level to high-level, and is primarily determined by the amount of plutonium, while the level of hotness is again determined by the amount of Cs-137 and Sr-90.

TRU and HLW tank waste are both generated in the reprocessing of spent fuel from a weapons reactor (not a commercial power reactor), but are differentiated by when in that process they were generated (figure below; definitely click on this one to see the detail). HLW is generated in the early steps of the process that removes the fission products (the pieces left over when the uranium or plutonium nucleus splits, or fissions), particularly the Cs-137 and Sr-90. TRU is generated in the following steps that separate the Pu for weapons, and has much less Cs-137 and Sr-90, although the amount varies.

The strange thing is, we have long ago removed much of the Cs-137 and Sr-90 from these HLW waste tanks, and the rest has been through a couple of half-lives, so there’s not enough Cs-137 and Sr-90 to make it anywhere near HLW anymore, at least in reality, scientifically. Instead, most of it is now TRU or LLW waste.

But it’s still legally HLW. So, what happens when human law collides with natural law?

First, it always ends up costing us a lot of money. Second, we always take too long to change the human law, which is why it ends up costing us a lot of money.

The argument around reclassification is always framed as sacrificing safety to save money. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reason it would save money is because treating the waste like what it actually is means not wasting money pretending it is what it isn’t.

There will be no lessening of safety. In fact, it will be safer for the workers to handle this waste correctly. Treating LLW or TRU waste like it’s HLW is dangerous to workers. Especially of you do it for 57 million gallons of waste. And this isn’t relaxing the interpretation of HLW definitions, it’s applying the actual definition correctly for the first time in decades.

What we have here is a classic bureaucratic knot of conflicting definitions that we need to fix in order to stop spending money just treading water, and to move forward with a resolution to our halted nuclear waste disposal program. Redefining this waste correctly will get it out of the tanks faster, get it into a safer form faster, and get the real HLW and TRU waste out of Washington State faster.

We really have to call the waste what it is. I know that requires a hefty bureaucratic lift since many groups are ideologically wedded to the past and we are a litigious country. But, come on, please don’t say we can’t even define anything anymore by what it actually is.

The multitude of laws and orders developed over the last 50 years have given us all the language and solutions we need, from the Ronald W. Reagan National Defense Authorization Act to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, from wording by the House Armed Services Committee to the NRC’s 10 CFR Part 61, to various DOE Orders.

Changing laws and agreements is very difficult these days, but is still a lot easier and cheaper than ignoring reality and treating HLW that is no longer high-level. The difference is about $400 billion and may be a few lives as well.

This story was originally published March 8, 2021 at 12:59 PM with the headline "Bureaucrats frustrate Hanford scientists | Guest Opinion."