The Energy Department has acknowledged that the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) may not be ready to reopen on Dec. 12 as planned, and the agency is now working to figure out exactly which activities are holding up the restart of operations at the nation’s only disposal site for the radio-contaminated material and equipment known as transuranic waste.
Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz earlier this month ordered the DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office “to reevaluate the critical path schedule for reopening WIPP,” according to an agency press release that hit the wire late on July 15. The critical path is the sequence of events in a project — such as the WIPP reopening — that the project manager believes will take the longest to complete.
In February, DOE published a WIPP Integrated Baseline that showed every step the agency planned to follow over the course of 15 months in order to get the mine ready to once again accept shipments of transuranic waste from across the complex. The schedule, not published until after DOE settled up with the state of New Mexico for about $70 million over the radiation leak and unrelated underground fire that shuttered WIPP in 2014, included milestone that dated to October 2015.
But DOE’s announcement last week effectively renders this public schedule obsolete, even as the agency affirmed its aim to reopen WIPP in December. The department gave no timetable for how long its re-evaluation of the critical path might take, and only hinted about which items are close to the critical path.
According to the press release, DOE and its WIPP prime contractor, Nuclear Waste Partnership, will pay special attention to several jobs that are mandatory for the site’s reopening: fitting new bolts to shore up the underground salt mine’s shifting ceilings and walls; readiness and testing operations for the interim ventilation system (IVS) that will increase mine airflow to the point where it is safe for workers to start interring transuranic waste there again; and maintenance of fire suppression systems.
A DOE spokesman reached Tuesday by email would not clarify whether these three activities were actually on the critical path at the moment. However the spokesman said IVS was “not far off.”
The nuclear point man for the city of Carlsbad, on the other hand, is convinced IVS is firmly on the critical path.
The “IVS system should have been in place last August, and it’s still not operable, and it’s now gained prominence and it’s on the critical path,” John Heaton, chairman of the Carlsbad Mayor’s Nuclear Task Force, told Weapons Complex Monitor in a Monday telephone interview.
The interim ventilation system was installed in April, but DOE and Nuclear Waste Partnership “apparently failed to get the operating procedures in place, so they can’t get it started,” Heaton said.
DOE is looking for a work-around on IVS and on June 3 applied for a modification to its WIPP operating permit with the state of New Mexico to allow personnel underground to work in pockets of stagnate airflow while wearing respirators. In its July 15 press release, DOE said IVS should be operational by August.
The agency provided no schedule for bolting, but said a “second hybrid bolter and an additional mining crew are expected to address outstanding ground control issues.” The hybrid bolter is a piece of construction equipment fueled by a diesel-electric motor, rather than a diesel-only motor. The hybrid would emit fewer volatile organic compounds, keeping mine air relatively cleaner.
The turn of events has upped the ante for the next WIPP Town Hall, which is schedule to live-stream from the Carlsbad City Council chambers on Aug. 4. DOE and contractor officials typically attend these events together, and take questions from both the in-house and internet audiences.
Heaton, fresh from a visit to Washington, D.C., the week of July 11, threw the blame for the now-looming delay squarely at Nuclear Waste Partnership.
“Everyone’s very concerned about the competency of the contractor,” Heaton said. “There’s something significantly wrong with the leadership, that they can’t accomplish these goals.”
An NWP spokesperson referred a request for comment to DOE.
The 15-month WIPP reopening schedule in the Integrated Baseline included 72 days of margin, and DOE has burned “a considerable amount” of it, Todd Shrader, manager of DOE Carlsbad Field Office, said in the July 15 press release.
That suggests some of the 72 days of margin remain, despite the fact that a crucial safety document, the Documented Safety Analysis, was delivered 100 days late in May. This voluminous list of safety procedures for WIPP operations was a critical chokepoint for other restart activities, including the eight-week waste-storage dress rehearsal known as cold operations, which were ongoing at Weapons Complex Monitor’s Friday deadline.
“It’s a great project,” Heaton said of WIPP. “But it’s been screwed up unbelievably.”
