Workers at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant have started the two-year effort to carve out a new underground panel for transuranic waste disposal at the salt mine near Carlsbad, N.M., the department said Tuesday.
In late December, Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) prime Salado Isolation Mining Contractors made its first cut into what will become Panel 11, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management said in a news release. WIPP’s new 10-year operating permit from the New Mexico Environment Department cleared the way for two new waste emplacement panels.
Crews dig out 120,000 tons of salt rock to develop a disposal panel, which consists of seven rooms each 300 feet long by 33 feet wide by 14 feet high, DOE said in the release.
So far, work crews have finished emplacing waste in one of the seven rooms in Panel 8, where waste disposal started in October 2022, according to DOE. Panels 11 and 12 will compensate for abandonment of Panel 9, and space lost elsewhere in the WIPP mine following a February 2014 underground radiation leak, according to agency plans for WIPP.
The prior prime contractor for WIPP started mining salt from Panel 8 in late 2013, but after the February 2014 underground radiation leak, the excavation did not resume until 2018.
