Although Not Magic, "WAND" Helps Manage Waste

"WAND," which stands for Waste Acceptance for Nonradioactive Disposal, is a very ambitious, four-year developmental project in radioactive waste management. The WAND project has developed an ultrasensitive survey system for low-density wastes generated at the Los Alamos Plutonium Facility. The system now allows us to separate nonradioactive wastes from radioactive wastes to the satisfaction of regulatory agencies. As of October 1997, it has finally resulted in approvals from a number of offices of the DOE, the NM State Environmental Division, and Los Alamos County.

About 60%­70% of the regular low-density waste generated at the plutonium facility is innocuous, nonradioactive waste. Until now, all the waste from the plutonium facility was labeled and handled as radioactive and disposed of according to applicable regulations. Although the associated costs were prohibitive, until now there was no reliable technology to prove conclusively that most of this waste was nonradioactive.

A team of experts from technology divisions NMT, NIS, and CST, and operations group EM/SWO took on the challenge to develop technologies and demonstrate to the satisfaction of all applicable bureaucracies and regulatory agencies that most of the waste stream from Los Alamos Plutonium Facility is nonradioactive and that it could be disposed of at a municipal site.

We would like to congratulate our colleagues who, in spite of enormous difficulties, persevered and succeeded. This technology could be transferred easily to other DOE sites, where it would lead to major savings in waste management costs.

Contributed by Sam Pillay, NMT-DO

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