Embarrassed DOE Forced to Finally Publicly Admit Failure in Scheme to Dump German High-Level Nuclear Waste on SRS, But SRS Watch Learned Much Earlier that the Project was Dead and Informed the Public Months Ago, as DOE Should Have Done
You won’t very often see DOE acting as it should so take a peek at the video linked below!
Some of you who track this website will recall the issue of import of German spent fuel the import to the Savannah River Site. This concerns almost 300,000 graphite balls impregnated with uranium, used in Germany’s long-closed AVR gas-cooled reactor. The scheme was to import the highly radioactive material, stored in large Castor casks (see photo), process it to remove the uranium and dump the waste into the SRS waste tanks or into unlined LLW trenches. This would complicate waste management and “clean up” at SRS.
DOE pledged in a December 2017 Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI), issued after DOE prepared an Environmental Assessment, to update the public and SRS Citizens Advisory Board (SRS CAB) about the project but has blatantly refused to provide any updates for almost 6 years. That opened the door to SRS Watch standing in for DOE, including at SRS Citizens Advisory Board meetings & on the SRS Watch website, in providing updates.
The SRS site manager – Mike Budney – was obligated at the very end of his site update at the SRS CAB meeting in North Charleston, South Carolina on May 15, 2023 to speak about the termination of the German spent fuel import plan. Must have been humiliating. Being after them for so long has paid off. The site manager update was incomplete and inaccurate – there have been significant developments over the last 6 years. Like, Savannah River National Lab has not been able to develop a technology to digest the graphite fuel and remove the uranium. A big lesson in this is that DOE may only honor commitments made under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) if doggedly forced to do so.
>>> See comments by the SRS site manager about the issue at SRS CAB meeting, May 15, 2023, at 1 hour 6 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUMRl7AjHeU
We put a recent SRS Watch news release on the issue on the CAB handouts table and some CAB members asked for it. The news release documents that the Germans have terminated the project and includes links to the key documents (in German).
For more details than you want about this issue, see the 21-page SRS Watch report of January 2023: Auf Wiedersehen to Nuclear Waste Dumping Scheme
In any event, after 11 years we won on this waste-dumping project, thanks in large part to our German colleagues. If DOE’s Office of Environmental Management wants to help Germany deal with this material in Germany, as we suggested years ago, that’s fine.
Meanwhile, DOE is dragging its feet in responding to a Freedom of Information Act request by SRS Watch – SRO-2023-00646-F Clements first letter German spent fuel agreement March 1 2023 – the response to which will confirm that the US-Germany agreement on R&D to process the material has not been renewed. The German entity – JEN – has confirmed this. (Link to contract that expired on February 28, 2023 is here: 2022-02-21-WFO-13-021-Mod-No.-9-received-23-March-2022)