The Department of Energy’s underground disposal site for defense-related transuranic waste is succumbing to mission creep, an agency critic 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 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.
The latest updated permit application filed with the New Mexico Environment Department seeks to extend WIPP operation beyond the currently-listed 2024 to beyond 2050, Hancock said.
These plans coupled with a DOE permit modification, now being litigated, which would change the manner in which it reports underground waste volume under the WIPP Land Withdrawal Act, would result in a “Forever WIPP,” Hancock said in written comments delivered Wednesday.
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.
