A STRATEGY FOR THE DEVELOPMENT AND DEPLOYMENT OF ALTERNATIVE MIXED WASTE TECHNOLOGIES IN RESPONSE TO THE PROPOSED SHUTDOWN OF DOE INCINERATORS

The Department of Energy (DOE) has successfully incinerated a variety of the organicbased mixed wastes that were generated from its past and present waste remediation, nuclear energy, and weapons missions. However, recent stakeholder and public concern over incinerator emissions and the increasingly stringent mandates of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to monitor and treat these emissions has caused the DOE to consider closure of all mixed waste incinerators complex wide. Regardless, some of the more challenging mixed waste existing in DOE storage contain sufficient quantities of transuranics, mercury compounds, explosives, and/or reactives, such that they are not amenable to efficient incineration and therefore technically require alternative methods for organic destruction. Consequently, the DOE’s Office of Science and Technology (OST) has established a new strategy to develop, demonstrate, and deploy the cost effective and timely alternative technologies needed to replace the role of incineration as well as to address these more challenging waste streams. General descriptions of the emerging alternative incineration technologies to be advanced through the strategy are provided, and these methods are classified in the three general categories of either thermal, aqueous based chemical oxidation (including dehalogenation), or separations. The strategy presented to develop these methods (and therefore to effectively compensate for any recent and pending DOE incineration closures) requires a broad range of efforts at various development stages, including those involving any basic science research and full- scale integrated demonstrations. To be successful, the specific development and deployment strategy (to be initiated by DOE’s and OST’s Transuranic and Mixed Waste Focus Area (TMWF)) must also include a regulatory and stakeholder approach, in addition to the traditional technical component.