Roger Snodgrass
For WC Monitor
8/22/2014
CARLSBAD, N.M.—While officials here are pleased with the attention garnered by Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz’s recent visit to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a host of questions remain unanswered about the radiological release at the facility in February. The Department of Energy may never know every detail of the WIPP event earlier this year, according to Terry Wallace, who is in charge of the technical assessment of the operational failure at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “Will we know every moment of a ticking clock? Probably not,” said Wallace, a senior manager at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who is overseeing the lab’s WIPP recovery operations. “We’ll be able to tell you – this kind of waste in these kind of environments, stacking a room with no ventilation – all these things together conspired to make a rather unique situation which should never have been there. But once it happened, then it’s explainable.”
The exact cause of the breached waste drum and heat damage in the underground has not been confirmed, and the Department has not released its recovery plan or a detailed time frame for getting the facility back up and running. However, at a visit here last week that included a tour of the WIPP facility, Energy Secretary Moniz said that a very plausible picture is coming into focus. “The science work going on to understand the radiological incident and the recovery plan – these are all moving along very, very well,” he said, noting that there is an independent technical assessment team composed of experts from six laboratories at work.
Moniz was less definite about the details of restarting operations at WIPP, but repeated assurances he gave during a Town Hall meeting in Carlsbad the night before—that he is committed to resuming safe operations at the plant, but not willing to compromise that safety by trying to meet an arbitrary date before the recovery plan was developed on a solid scientific foundation. “We’ll have time to get a schedule out and we want to do it as soon as possible, but safety has to be the driver and that’s largely built on completing our understanding and getting all of us together in terms of a plan we can stand behind,” he said.
Recovery Funding Critical, Local Officials Say
The extra focus on WIPP and reassurances on the eventual reopening of the plant was welcomed by local officials, who are hoping for extra funding for the plant in FY’15 to aid in the recovery effort. Before the incident occurred, DOE requested a Fiscal Year 2015 of $220 million, though Department officials have told Congressional staff that more than $100 million in additional funding is necessary for recovery from the fire and radiation release. Community concerns voiced during the Town Hall emphasized limited resources and uncertainties about future support. Jay Jenkins, President of the Carlsbad National Bank and the Carlsbad Department of Development, said the WIPP budget had been declining in recent years while the expectations of shipments have grown. He said that the maintenance funding was inadequate and needed an additional $10 million a year over the next 10 years.
Moniz: Operations Could Restart in 18 Months
Although WIPP will not be accepting waste shipments from around the country for an indefinite period, Moniz said he is trying to maintain the same workforce. “The jobs are different now than they were a year ago, but we’re going to get back to that full operation,” he said. Moniz said he and Nuclear Waste Partnership President Bob McQuinn had talked about having a recovery plan mapped out by late September, ready to send around for comments to see if it can be improved. They have in mind restarting operations in about 18 months. “Not a full operation,” he said, “that’ll take longer.”
Another issue for locals has been whether all WIPP workers will remain employed at the site until it reopens. John Heaton, chairman of the Carlsbad mayor’s nuclear task force, a former state representative and a long-time supporter of nuclear development in the area, said that there needs to be an emphasis on moving faster with the recovery effort, in part to maintain the workforce. “If we could get this recovery going I think all of the employees are going to be in big demand. I don’t see them not continuing their employment,” he said.
Locals Want Independent Oversight
Heaton and other locals have pushed for independent oversight of the facility to rebuild confidence in the community and ensure that the same issues that contributed to the event don’t happen again. “We need oversight that visually sees that things are done properly and not just by looking at reports or how policies are written. We need oversight that is real, that is factual, observable, that is competency based, where there is training.” Heaton said. “Right now, the oversight absolutely stinks or these events wouldn’t have occurred.”
Question Remains as to Exact Cause
But the question remains as to how exactly the release occurred. Unlike aviation accidents which can sometimes be pieced together from logs and data contained in a flight recorder, the WIPP accident must be recreated, not from a “black box,” but from observations of a partially blackened barrel with its lid unsealed. The container, which went undetected at first, was photographed three months after the event by workers wearing protective clothing in a chamber still contaminated by the release. Additional inferences have been drawn from the trail of documents detailing the contents and history of the container and its surroundings, air-monitoring information, radiological surveys and visual assessments of conditions in the mine.
Los Alamos is involved in the WIPP accident because a drum packed and certified at the laboratory was identified as the container that contributed most of the radiological load at the breach. “I’ve pulled apart every one of our processes, every one of our subcontracts,” LANL’s Wallace said. “How did we get to this point? That’s my goal by the end of the year to tell everybody 100 percent why it happened.” Wallace said the detective work was necessary not only to assure safety for the facility and the public but also to make sure such an event will never happen again.
