A final, crunch-time review to determine if the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is ready to receive nuclear waste for the first time in nearly three years will take less time to finish than once thought, the Department of Energy announced Tuesday.
The DOE-led operational readiness review that began Monday, as first reported in Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, will last about two weeks, the agency stated in a press release. That is eight days fewer than DOE pencilled in for the review in the WIPP restart schedule published in February.
DOE and WIPP prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) had to conduct other reviews to certify the deep-underground salt mine near Carlsbad, N.M., is ready to reopen, but operational readiness reviews are the last on the docket.
The agency-led evaluation underway now was preceded by an NWP-led operational readiness review that wrapped up Oct. 14 and took 11 days to complete: far fewer than the 27 on DOE’s WIPP restart schedule.
Assuming the DOE review does indeed take two weeks, the quicker-than-expected operational readiness assessments will have restored 24 days of schedule to the WIPP restart, compared with the deadlines the agency and NWP made public earlier this year.
Should DOE complete its final review in two weeks, and should the New Mexico Environment Department concur that WIPP is indeed ready to resume operations, the mine could reopen for waste disposal in mid-to-late December, and begin accepting waste shipments from across the complex two to three months after that, the agency has said.
WIPP is the nation’s only deep-underground, permanent disposal facility for transuranic waste: material and equipment radioactively contaminated during nuclear weapons development by elements heavier than uranium. The mine has been closed since February 2014 following an accident underground radiation release and earlier, unrelated underground fire.
DOE and NWP once thought WIPP could reopen in March. In 2015, the date slipped to mid-December: a target DOE now appears likely to meet or almost meet, despite the very late delivery of a key safety document early this year that consumed all of the agency’s schedule buffer and threatened to push the reopening into 2017.
