Nuclear-cleanup sites across the country might learn next week when they may resume shipping radioactively contaminated material and equipment to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
Officials from cleanup sites overseen by the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) are expected to gather at DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office on Feb. 7-8 for all-day meetings of the National TRU Waste Program that manages the agency’s transuranic waste — matter contaminated by elements heavier than uranium in the course of nuclear weapons production.
The recently reopened Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is DOE’s only permanent, deep-underground repository for transuranic waste, and legacy cleanup sites throughout agency’s nuclear complex have not shipped new material there in almost three years. WIPP reopened in December following a lengthy recovery from an underground radiation release and unrelated underground fire.
Carlsbad Field Office Deputy Manager Jeff Carswell is the acting National TRU Program recovery manager. The program also got representation at DOE headquarters in Washington, D.C., last year as part of EM’s internal bureaucratic reorganization; Elizabeth Forinash leads the headquarters TRU program office.
Of all DOE facilities waiting to resume shipments to WIPP, the Idaho National Laboratory has the largest backlog of transuranic waste. That site is expected to be at or near the top of the list to ship waste to WIPP, Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing in January, citing conversations with DOE. The Hanford Site in Washington state is last in line, according to the state’s Department of Ecology.
Even after shipments resume, WIPP prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) will not be able to bury waste as quickly as it will pile up at the site. Before the accidents that closed WIPP in 2014, NWP interred more than 15 shipments of waste a week. The contractor currently buries two shipments a week but has said it could ramp up to as many as five shipments per week by next month.
