Workers at the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., checked off a major milestone Thursday, when they finished almost three months of practicing the stricter new waste-disposal procedures they will follow when the nation’s only transuranic waste-disposal facility reopens.
Taken together with a company spokesman’s Thursday statement that WIPP prime Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) has already completed its internal review of those waste-emplacement dress rehearsals — known officially as cold operations — the news means DOE and its contractor are only about a month behind their ambitious goal of reopening WIPP by mid-December.
“Cold Operations were declared complete today,” NWP spokesoman Donavan Mager told Weapons Complex Monitor by email. Also on Thursday, Mager said, NWP completed its management self-assessment of the just-finished cold ops.
Cold operations, which do not involve nuclear materials, began months late on June 1 and took nearly two weeks longer than expected to complete. That was due in part to malfunctioning people-carrying equipment in the deep-underground salt mine.
NWP essentially made up that two-week slip by completing its management self-assessment alongside cold operations. The assessment had been scheduled to begin only after cold ops ended and was to take about two weeks to finish, according to the WIPP restart schedule published in February by DOE and the contractor. The management self-assessment must still be vetted by industry experts outside NWP before the contractor can proceed to the next step in the mine’s reopening: a more extensive contractor operational readiness review that will take about a month to prepare. As with the assessment just completed, the contractor readiness review will be performed by NWP and then checked by DOE and outside experts.
WIPP has been closed since 2014, when an improperly packaged barrel of radio-contaminated material and equipment from the Los Alamos National Laboratory blew open in the underground salt mine’s Panel 7 disposal area. That accident closely followed an unrelated underground fire. As recently as 2015, DOE thought WIPP might reopen in March. In February, the agency and NWP slipped that date to December.
In July, after the critical new safety procedures NWP would practice in cold ops were approved more than 100 days later than expected, DOE acknowledged it would be challenged to make the December date. The department built only about 70 days of margin into the WIPP restart schedule published in February.
The contractor-authored safety procedures codified in the nearly 800-page Documented Safety Analysis DOE approved in late May were a major bottleneck to starting cold operations. A DOE official acknowledged in a June 2 WIPP town hall the agency decided to take its time vetting the massive document, even if it pushed the cold operations and the subsequent mine reopening to the right.
For the four years through 2017, DOE plans to spend upward of $1.2 billion on WIPP, according to charts briefed in February to WIPP stakeholders when the agency and its contractor made the Dec. 12 restart date public. These costs include NWP’s prime contract, plus expenses incurred to keep watch over caches of transuranic waste stranded across the DOE complex following WIPP’s closure.
Over the same four years, DOE expects to spend another $250 million or so at WIPP for new costs related to the accident, including mine repairs, accident investigation, and other activities such as the new Documented Safety Analysis that guided NWP’s cold operations.
In addition to those costs, there is the matter of a new ventilation system for the mine. Drilling out a new exhaust shaft and buffing up WIPP’s ventilation system to pre-accident levels is expected to cost between $270 million and $400 million, and will not be complete until sometime next decade, DOE has said.
