The Energy Department is preparing for a scenario in which some portion of the transuranic waste now stored above ground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. remains above ground until next summer — six months after the mine’s scheduled, and now-imperiled, December reopening.
That is according to a modification granted last month by the New Mexico Environment Department to the WIPP operating permit held by DOE and WIPP prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership.
The state allowed DOE and its contractor to continue storing a cache of transuranic waste above ground at WIPP’s Waste Handling Building until June 30, 2017. The waste arrived has been sitting there since around the time of the 2014 accidental underground fire and later, unrelated radiation release that shuttered the mine.
The Waste Handling Building is the final top-side stop for waste bound for permanent internment in the deep geologic repository; any occupied space in the building means less room for new shipments of transuranic waste from across the DOE complex.
Waste now stored in the Waste Handling Building would be the first to go underground, once WIPP opens, DOE has said. In a permit modification request dated June 13 — about a month before DOE publicly admitted the December reopening was in jeopardy — the agency said it would take about three months to move this waste underground.
At that clip, and assuming a December reopening, the Waste Handling Building would be emptied by the end of March. However, the agency and its contractor asked for “an additional three months, as a contingency, should the emplacement process proceed slower than anticipated,” according to the permit modification request signed by Todd Shrader, manager of DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, and Philip Breidenbach, president and project manager for Nuclear Waste Partnership.
That would leave DOE and Nuclear Waste Partnership free to stretch the job out over six months, or to start three months late, if need be.
The New Mexico Environment Department has granted the request. However, the state told DOE and the contractor in a June 23 letter to come up with a backup plan, in case it takes even longer to get the waste into the mine.
If agency and the company realize the waste now stored in the Waste Handling Building cannot be disposed of by the June 30, 2017, deadline, “the Permittees shall submit a written proposal to [the New Mexico Environment Department] that revaluates the alternative storage options no later than June 16, 2016,” Kathryn Roberts, director of the department’s Resource Protection Division, wrote in the letter approving the permit modification request.
Neither the state, DOE, nor Nuclear Waste Partnership immediately replied to requests for comment Monday.
