Recent problems behind it, the Department of Energy said Friday it is ready to resume taking shipments of transuranic waste at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico after being unable to do so for about a month.
Having addressed difficulties with the mine’s underground floor and COVID, shipments should resume next week, a spokesperson at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), a site spokesperson said Friday. In the past week, there have only been two confirmed active cases of COVID at the southeastern New Mexico repository, the spokesperson said.
An earlier uptick in COVID-19 cases and some uneven underground floor conditions led DOE to temporarily halt disposal of defense-related transuranic waste at WIPP, according to a report by the federal government’s independent nuclear health-and-safety watchdog.
The COVID surge required some WIPP workers to quarantine, according to a regular monthly site report by Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) staff dated Sept. 3 and recently posted on the board’s website. Also, “[u]neven floor conditions discovered in the underground resulted in a halt to disposal operations,” according to the document.
As a consequence of these and related factors, the DOE Carlsbad Field Office “was forced to limit the number of shipments the site could receive in this month,” according to the report to DNFSB’s technical director Christopher Roscetti.
The WIPP problems would help explain why the disposal facility took in only seven shipments during the month of August, a major fall off from the 41 recorded in July.
