The Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management and contractor UCOR have successfully reestablished full production capacity at the Transuranic Waste Processing Center.
Office of Environmental Management
February 3, 2025
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The Transuranic Waste Processing Center sits on 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 center to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
OAK RIDGE, Tenn. — The Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM) and contractor UCOR have successfully reestablished full production capacity at the Transuranic Waste Processing Center.
Recent repairs have teams at the facility working full speed again as they process and repackage waste for shipment and permanent disposal to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico. Years of defense-related research conducted primarily at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in decades past generated Oak Ridge’s transuranic material.
A large, 900-pound waste-drum crusher at the center had broken. It plays a key role in waste processing operations, requiring teams to replace the equipment.
When drums arrive at the center for processing, employees empty them to access, process and repackage the waste for shipment and disposal. Once emptied, the drums are reduced in size and disposed of as well.
The mission of the crusher is to do exactly that: squash the empty drums. However, its outage presented multiple challenges.
Transuranic Waste Processing Center workers safely replaced the facility’s 900-pound waste-drum crusher, restoring the center’s full waste processing capabilities for an ongoing cellulosic waste campaign.
With the crusher out of commission, workers wore protective suits and manually cut and reduced the size of the old drums. While this approach kept work moving forward, it also presented more risks, took more time and was more labor 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 Transuranic Waste Processing Center 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 before entering the room. 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,” UCOR End State Delivery Director Clint Wolfley said.
When waste drums arrive at the Transuranic Waste Processing Center for processing, employees empty them to access, process and repackage the waste for shipment and disposal. The employees pictured here are loading the processed and repackaged waste for shipment.
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 U.S. Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management complex.
That approval, which occurred last year, allows employees to advance work that is eliminating Oak Ridge's remaining inventory of transuranic waste stored onsite.
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.
-Contributor: Chris Caldwell