West Valley Former Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing SIte

Department of Energy and NEw York State Energy Research and Development Authority

The Department of Energy’s West Valley Demonstration Project (WVDP), near West Valley, New York, is a former nuclear fuel reprocessing site located in a complex hydrogeologic environment that includes multiple unsaturated zones as well as surface water interactions with on-site creeks. This is a critical project for both the DOE and New York State that addresses many challenging issues that affect the decisions that need to be made, including: land transfer; license termination; a complex array of regulations including NEPA, DOE Orders, and New York State; and NRC and EPA regulations that pertain to radioactive waste disposal. These issues are surprisingly complex for such a geographically small site. In addition, erosion potential and climate change require engineering options to stabilize the site and the erosion channels, and there is a diverse group of stakeholders that have competing interests and objectives.

Neptune is directly supporting WVDP and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) Phase 2 decision making to evaluate and determine the best path forward regarding decommissioning and/or long-term stewardship of previously disposed radioactive waste and residual contamination on and around the West Valley site. Neptune provides stakeholder engagement support, addresses the complex environmental compliance issues, and has developed a QA program for modeling and IT support that has been granted NQA-1 approval by DOE.

The primary purpose of Phase 2 decision making is to find the best option for the more than 400 deep holes and trenches in which radioactive waste is disposed. The original scope included a sensitivity analysis of the existing performance assessment (PA) models for the PA that was developed deterministically to support the 2010 Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS). Neptune’s initial review of the existing information in the FEIS and supporting documents and models revealed deficiencies in both the modeling and the quality assurance of the models beyond those that had been identified by previous reviewers. Neptune recommended that the sensitivity analysis not be performed and worked with DOE and NYSERDA to redirect the resources to other needs, including erosion modeling, a structured decision making approach for alternatives analysis, identification of source terms, and a model design document that clearly identified all the source terms for a probabilistic PA model.