The Department of Energy’s underground disposal site for defense-related transuranic waste is succumbing to mission creep, a critic of the agency told the New Mexico Legislature’s Radioactive and Hazardous Materials Committee last week.
The mission at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad “is not for defense high-level waste, commercial spent nuclear fuel, or any commercial waste,” said Don Hancock, nuclear administrator for the Albuquerque-based Southwest Research and Information Center.
But the DOE Office of Environmental Management is now seriously looking at proposals to bring transuranic waste to WIPP from new plutonium pit production at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. In addition, there has long been talk of bringing to WIPP transuranic-like material leftover from a commercial nuclear reprocessing operation at what is now the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York. Proposals to use WIPP for disposal of greater-than-Class-C waste have also been kicked around, Hancock said.
WIPP would need to operate until after 2080 to accommodate the transuranic waste that will be generated from Savannah River Site pit production from 2030 to 2080, Hancock said.
Hancock made his presentation Oct. 21 to the interim committee composed of a dozen members drawn equally from the New Mexico House of Representatives and the state senate. It meets between regular legislative sessions.
The panel “can propose legislation, but I don’t expect that it will,” Hancock said in a Thursday email. “All of the Legislature is up for election on Nov. 3 and some of them won’t be re-elected,” he added. The next session starts in January.
The latest updated permit application filed with the New Mexico Environment Department seeks to extend WIPP operation to beyond 2050. The permit’s current language says waste emplacement should stop in 2024, although no one expects that to happen.
These plans, coupled with an under-litigation DOE permit modification that would change the manner in which the agency reports underground waste volumes at the disposal site, would result in a “Forever WIPP,” Hancock said in written comments delivered Oct. 21.
During the same hearing, the manager of DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, Reinhard Knerr, outlined the ongoing program of infrastructure improvements at WIPP. He also noted that DOE and WIPP prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership have received temporary authorization from the state to proceed with sinking a new underground shaft into the salt mine. The new shaft is designed to provide greater access to the underground.
The temporary authorization, issued in April, allowed work to begin, Knerr noted. Thus far, the first 116 feet of the 2,100-foot deep shaft has been drilled.
Additional drilling awaits completion of a new multi-level drill platform on the surface, according to the Knerr presentation. The work should resume in December, he said.
The Department of Energy and prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership are estimating WIPP will receive about 250 shipments between August 2020 and July 2021. A spokesman for the contractor said by email this week that “WIPP will adjust our projections should our operational priorities need to shift, just as we have done since the beginning of the pandemic.”
