The Transuranic Waste Processing Center at Oak Ridge

The US Department of Energy (DOE) said the Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM) and contractor UCOR have reestablished full production capacity at the Transuranic Waste Processing Centre (TWPC).

The centre occupies 25 acres at the Oak Ridge Reservation and has 38,000 square feet of waste processing buildings and support facilities. Since 2008, employees have completed more than 7,200 waste shipments from the centre to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico.

Following recent repairs, teams at the facility are working full speed again as they process and repackage waste for shipment and permanent disposal at WIPP. Decades of defence-related research conducted primarily at Oak Ridge National Laboratory generated Oak Ridge’s transuranic material. A large, 900 lb waste-drum crusher at the centre had broken requiring teams to replace the equipment.

When drums arrive at the centre for processing, employees empty them to access, process and repackage the waste for shipment and disposal. Once emptied, the drums are reduced in size using the crusher. Its outage had presented multiple challenges.

With the crusher out of commission, workers had to wear protective suits and manually cut and reduce the size of the old drums. While this approach kept work moving forward, it also presented more risks, took more time and was more labour intensive. The equipment’s failure also impacted activities in the work area below the crusher.

“With the drum crusher’s location on top of the contact-handled waste glovebox in the facility’s main operating gallery, we couldn’t process waste in that glovebox, and we were also forced to reduce the size of those waste drums in an alternate process area,” UCOR TWPC Area Project Manager Pat Rapp said.

Replacing the waste-drum crusher required entering a confined space. Safety, maintenance and waste operator teams planned and trained extensively for this. The challenging work included conducting a critical lift, working from scaffolding and navigating tight clearance spaces on the replacement.

“We had a lot of great support to get this issue safely resolved and restore our full waste processing posture for our ongoing cellulosic waste campaign,” said UCOR End State Delivery Director Clint Wolfley.

Workers are in the middle of a campaign to process 100 drums of waste containing cellulosic material. This material poses risks of combusting if left untreated. However, OREM and UCOR developed one of the first approved processes to treat this waste in the DOE Environmental Management complex. OREM and UCOR expect to complete processing the cellulosic waste this year.

To date, Oak Ridge has shipped 94% of its contact-handled waste and 78% of its remote-handled waste to WIPP for permanent emplacement in the underground repository.