The same week non-nuclear air contamination halted recovery efforts in parts of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., Energy Department officials in Washington insisted the underground waste storage facility will be ready to reopen by December.
On Wednesday, two days after WIPP prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) evacuated portions of the facility due to elevated levels of volatile organic compounds and carbon monoxide, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz told reporters DOE still planned to reopen WIPP by year’s end.
“We believe we are still on track for safely resuming operations at WIPP this year, late in the year,” Moniz said during a news briefing hosted the IHS Energy CERAWeek conference in Houston.
Moniz doubled down on the date after congressional testimony earlier in the week from his deputy and chief DOE nuclear cleanup official Monica Regalbuto.
In prepared remarks Tuesday to the Senate Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee, Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management (EM) Regalbuto said safely reopening WIPP this year is “among EM’s top priorities.”
In a stakeholder briefing Feb. 19 in Carlsbad, DOE said it plans to reopen WIPP to shipments of transuranic waste — radio-contaminated equipment and material, not radioactive elements themselves — on Dec. 12.
WIPP closed to new shipments after an underground fire and unrelated radiation release in February 2014. The recovery is projected to cost about $244 million over three years, according to DOE slides dated Feb. 19 and labeled “WIPP Integrated Performance Measurement Baseline Workshop.”
Meanwhile, it is unclear whether the ongoing “safety pause” at WIPP will delay the facility’s reopening. A spokesperson for Nuclear Waste Partnership said Friday sections of WIPP’s northeast and southern corridors, which were closed when a worker’s handheld monitoring device detected stagnant air, remain off-limits. Workers are active elsewhere in the facility, the spokesperson said.
NWP did not detect any radioactive contaminants, the company said. Affected areas will remain blocked off, “until NWP has fully developed and implemented the appropriate compensatory measures necessary to ensure worker safety in all areas of the mine.”
Workers initially from the mine were examined by medical personnel and release, apparently with no ill effects from the bad air.
A representative of the Nuclear Watch New Mexico in Albuquerque lauded Nuclear Waste Partnership for putting worker safety first, but slammed DOE for rushing to reopen WIPP.
“The planned restarting of some operations at WIPP in December 2016 is an expensive and unnecessary exhibition,” Scott Kovac, the watchdog group’s operations and research director, wrote in a Thursday email. Kovac said while the New Mexico Environment Department and DOE “agreed to remove the original ventilation requirements at WIPP and replaced them with interim measures to accelerate the repository’s recovery, WIPP should not reopen at all until the new exhaust shaft is in place and the original ventilation levels can be met.”
NWP has paused operations underground in the past for stagnant air, and while the interim ventilation installation planned as part of DOE’s WIPP reopening plan will help, it is unlikely to totally eliminate pockets of stagnant air in the facility, the spokesman said. In addition, the spokesperson said WIPP’s air-quality requirements “are magnitudes more conservative than industry guidelines” for mines, increasing the likelihood of alarms.
An NWP executive stood by his company’s actions.
“This is what we are supposed to do,” Phil Breidenbach, NWP president and project manager, said in a prepared statement. “We are learning from operating experience and continuing to improve our programs and processes to better protect workers.”
