After 40 years of effort and over $3 billion in government funds, the Department of Energy still has no end in sight for the cleanup of the abandoned West Valley, N.Y., plutonium reprocessing site, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report. The congressional watchdog agency said DOE “cannot estimate the cleanup’s final cost until it decides how it will address the remaining waste.”
The GAO said that since 2011, “DOE has demolished 51 of 55 structures there and disposed of about 1.3 million cubic feet of low-level waste to off-site locations. It has also placed solidified high-level waste into interim on-site storage. In addition, DOE has processed for interim on-site storage about 30,000 cubic feet of transuranic waste (which is contaminated with elements that have an atomic number greater than uranium).”
GAO added, “DOE has been unable to dispose of the high-level and transuranic wastes stored at West Valley because there are no facilities authorized to accept these wastes. DOE has identified two potential options for disposal of the transuranic waste: the federal Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico and a commercial facility in Texas. However, the New Mexico facility is authorized to accept only waste from atomic energy defense activities, and DOE does not consider West Valley waste to be from atomic energy defense activities.”
As for the waste site in Texas, the state has banned disposal at the Lone Star State facility.
So it’s up to Congress to act to clear the way for finishing the West Valley Demonstration Project. GAO said, “Congress should consider taking action to provide a legal option for the disposal of West Valley’s transuranic waste.”
West Valley is the residue of the failure of private sector plutonium reprocessing, based on wrong fundamental reasoning. The project was conceived in the early 1960s, when the conventional wisdom (which was entirely wrong) was that uranium was a limited resource and could be supplemented by plutonium separated from spent uranium fuel (and ultimately with the assist of breeder reactors).
In 1961, New York acquired over 3,300 acres of land in Ashford, N.Y., west of Buffalo. In 1963, Nuclear Fuel Services, a subsidiary of W.R. Grace, got approval from the Atomic Energy Commission to reprocess spent fuel, with the first shipments arriving in 1965. Getty Oil acquired Nuclear Fuel Services in 1969.
The Union of Concerned Scientists wrote in 2008, “After beginning operations in 1966 with a theoretical capacity to reprocess 300 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel per year, the facility reprocessed a total of 640 tons of waste in six years before shutting down in 1972.” The site constitutes was the only privately-owned plutonium reprocessing center to have operated in the U.S. General Electric built a plant in Morris, Ill., and Allied General Nuclear Services also constructed a facility in Barnwell, S.C. Both failed to get permission to operate.
In 1980, Congress passed the West Valley Demonstration Project Act, telling DOE to deal with the waste at the site. DOE and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority entered an agreement to run the cleanup. The feds would get control of the 175-acre site’s “high security” area and lead on the project. NYSERDA would look after the manage the remainder. The U.S. government would pay for 90% of the costs, with New York eating the rest.
UCS predicted in 2008, “Cleanup of reprocessing activities at the site, including ‘low-level’ waste removal and decontamination, is expected to take 40 years and cost over $5 billion.” So far, that prediction looks credible.
–Kennedy Maize
kenmaize@gmail.com