By completing a critical contractor review in less than half the time originally scheduled, the Energy Department clawed back about two weeks of lost time on the reopening of the the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico, keeping a late-December reopening in play.
The agency had been about a month behind schedule to reopen WIPP by the official target of Dec. 12, so while the two-week time-saver would appear to leave that date out of reach, reopening the deep-underground salt mine by Dec. 31 is now possible — assuming DOE and the New Mexico Environment Department do not find any show-stoppers in their own inspections.
A DOE agency operational readiness review is slated to begin Nov. 14, sources said this week.
As for the contractor operational readiness review, WIPP-prime Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) completed that in only 11 days. A stringent self-assessment of whether the AECOM-BWX Technologies partnership is ready to reopen the deep-underground transuranic waste disposal facility outside Carlsbad, the NWP review was scheduled to last 27 days and was originally to start in mid-June, according to a public schedule the agency published in February.
Instead, the review began Oct. 3, DOE Carlsbad Field Office Manager Todd Shrader said in a town hall meeting webcast from Carlsbad on Oct. 7; It ended Oct. 14, according to DOE slides briefed Oct. 28 to members of the Idaho National Laboratory Site Environmental Management Citizens Advisory Board in Sun Valley, Idaho.
NWP chewed up all three months of its schedule reserve for the targeted December reopening, plus roughly another month on top of that, after taking far longer than expected to secure DOE approval of its Documented Safety Analysis — a roughly 800-page document that codifies the rigid new safety procedures intended to prevent repeats of the 2014 underground fire and radiological leak that have kept WIPP closed for more than two years now.
The delay pushed many reopening milestones rightward, but NWP has reclaimed schedule where it could. Whenever WIPP reopens, it will not begin accepting new shipments of transuranic waste — equipment and material contaminated by elements heavier than uranium — for about another three months after that, Shrader has said.
