When radioactive wastes aren’t radioactive wastes

The U.S. Department of Energy wants to redefine what constitutes high-level radioactive waste, cutting corners on the disposal of some of the most dangerous and long-lasting waste byproduct on earth — reprocessed spent fuel from the nuclear defense program. That is not quite true, as Congress specifically defined high-level radioactive waste in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, and any reinterpretation of that definition should trigger a Congressional response. The DOE itself acknowledges on its Hanford Website page that these chemical byproducts are “caustic and extremely hazardous to humans and the environment and couldn’t be poured onto the ground or into the Columbia River.” Yet somehow, last summer, the DOE announced plans to reclassify high-level radioactive waste in 16 partially emptied tanks at Hanford, Lauren Goldberg, Legal and Program Director of Columbia Riverkeeper, a nonprofit with a mission to protect the Columbia River, told DCReport. “What the DOE has done with this rule is unilaterally, with no oversight from an independent regulator, given itself the authority to decide – at any time and in any way it chooses — how it will make final disposition of this waste.” Reinterpreting radioactivity It is unclear exactly which current high-level radioactive waste and how much of it the agency plans to reclassify. The group of agencies, including NRDC, the Institute for Policy Studies, the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Columbia Riverkeeper and SRS Watch, wrote a letter to Theresa Kliczewskian Environmental Protection Specialist at the DOE in January, arguing against the reclassification of “extraordinarily radioactive waste.” The letter stated, “Reprocessing waste is categorically treated as HLWand defined by its origin because it is necessarily both ‘intensely radioactive and long-lived.’” To be clear, some plutonium isotopes would take about 240,000 years before decaying away, and some uranium isotopes would stay radioactive for about 4.5 billion years, according to the letter filed by the consortium.