Since it resumed accepting transuranic waste in April, the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant has received 68 shipments as of Sept. 25, officials said Thursday during a “WIPP Town Hall” in Carlsbad, N.M.
The officials also offered some details of a potential rock fall situation in one of the underground mine’s storage rooms.
With shipments now approaching six per week, WIPP is expected to receive 258 shipments between August 2017 and August 2018, DOE Carlsbad Field Office Manager Todd Shrader told the webcast event. Waste shipments so far have been limited to three DOE facilities and the privately operated Waste Control Specialists storage complex in Andrews County, Texas, but the number of participating sites is due to expand in coming months.
Waste Control Specialists has since 2014 held several hundred containers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The material was shipped to Texas after a container from Los Alamos burst open in the WIPP underground in February 2014, releasing radiation and shutting down the facility for nearly three years. “Shippable” material stored at Waste Control Specialists’ facility should be moved to WIPP by the end of 2017, said Bruce Covert, president and project manager for WIPP prime Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP).
During the past week, DOE agreed to a new task order with Waste Control Specialists for management of the remaining containers, including continued storage of some potentially combustible waste that cannot yet be shipped to WIPP.
The WIPP Town Hall included presentations by Shrader and Covert, among others. The range of topics discussed included ways the site is working with waste generators to ensure proper characterization and certification of transuranic waste before it is moved to New Mexico. NWP National TRU Program Manager Mark Pearcy said officials from WIPP will be involved in direct observation of material being prepared for shipping, some of which might have to be repackaged.
“My job is to keep the pipeline full of waste,” Pearcy said. All shippers want to be in that pipeline, he added. Much of the TRU waste at generator sites dates from the 1960s through the 1980s. “They weren’t think about WIPP when it got packaged,” Pearcy said.
Waste emplacement in Room 5 of Panel 7 started in September 2017. Underground conditions indicate that a rock fall could occur in Room 6 of Panel 7 in the next four to six weeks, officials said. Personnel have not been allowed into the room for more than a year, officials said. They noted that rock falls are not uncommon underground.
WIPP officials indicated that more than $25 million of infrastructure spending is planned during fiscal 2018, with the big-ticket item being the first phase of a high-pressure fire water loop. This will replace an aging water supply line that poses an increasing safety risk.
During NWP’s new three-year contract extension, the contractor will have two-thirds of its incentives linked to infrastructure and safety and one-third linked to production, said DOE Carlsbad Contracting Officer Suzanne Hunt.
NWP Could Earn Up to $12.5M in Fees for FY18
As management and operations contractor for WIPP, NWP stands to earn up to $12.5 million in fees in fiscal 2018, based on its capacity to carry out a number of missions, including mining additional storage space and mitigation of areas contaminated by the 2014 underground radiation release, according to DOE.
The department laid out potential award fees and expectations in an Aug. 31 performance evaluation and measurement plan and annual fee plan for Nuclear Waste Partnership, covering the period from Oct. 1, 2017, to Sept. 30, 2018.
Twenty-five percent of the available fee ($3.1 million) will be based on five subjective criteria: mission performance, regulatory compliance, management performance, safety and health performance, and cost control.
The remaining 75 percent of the available fee ($9.4 million) will be based on objective operational criteria, covering a long list of performance-based incentives, including progress in mining the new Panel 8 storage space; dealing with “aging and degraded infrastructure” at WIPP; continuing waste emplacement; mitigation in Panel 7, where the waste container burst open in 2014; and finishing emplacement of all remaining DOE Type I waste stored temporarily at the privately operated Waste Control Specialists site in West Texas.
AECOM and BWX Technologies are partners in the WIPP prime, along with subcontractor AREVA Federal Services. They first received the contract in April 2012, and took over operations that October of the nation’s only permanent deep underground repository for TRU waste.
DOE announced on Sept. 15 that NWP would retain the management and operation contract through September 2020. The three-year contract renewal is worth about $928 million.
WIPP-Area Roads Getting $27 Million in Repairs From Settlement
Almost $27 million will be earmarked for road improvements around WIPP as an outgrowth of a 2016 settlement between the Energy Department and the state of New Mexico, Gov. Susana Martinez said this week.
The funding should shore up New Mexico routes used for transporting Energy Department transuranic waste to the nation’s only underground repository for such material.
The spending is part of the $74 million settlement between the state and DOE in the wake of the February 2014 accidents at WIPP.
“When we first learned of the fire and radiation leak in 2014, we moved quickly to hold the federal government accountable, and I’m pleased that we’ll be able to use these funds to further strengthen the safety of WIPP and the surrounding communities,” Martinez said in a news release.
The $26.8 million should help repave 180 miles on four roadways in southeast New Mexico, according to the state news release. All funding from the settlement is to be used for projects in the Carlsbad and Los Alamos areas.
