The Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico would get a funding spike to $403 million in the Trump administration fiscal 2019 budget request, which envisions the underground disposal site taking 10 shipments weekly.
The budget proposal for the Carlsbad Field Office would be $79 million over the 2017 enacted level of spending and $99 million more than WIPP’s annualized spending under a series of short-term budgets passed by Congress in the current fiscal 2018. The 10 shipments per week would be almost double WIPP’s best weeks after it resumed waste emplacement in 2017.
It was not immediately clear if the 10-shipment milestone is one WIPP might meet in the 2018 calendar year or after the new permanent ventilation system is operational by 2022.
The beefed-up WIPP budget would include $85 million for building a new permanent ventilation system and underground shaft designed to increase underground airflow to allow simultaneous mining and waste emplacement, according to a summary of the $6.6 billion proposal for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management.
Thanks to supplemental upgrades at WIPP, total airflow is now roughly 114,000 cubic feet per minute (CFM). Installation of the new system should increase the airflow to about 540,000 CFM.
The Energy Department is moving ahead this year with procurement of the Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation project and the Utility Shaft Project. The project – not including the ventilation shaft – is estimated to cost $273 million, WIPP officials have said. A cost estimate has not yet been completed for the exhaust shaft, WIPP officials said in December.
During a Monday telephone briefing with reporters, DOE officials said WIPP, as the nation’s only underground repository for defense transuranic waste, is important to the department’s cleanup of its Cold War nuclear infrastructure. Waste from DOE sites in Idaho, New Mexico, Tennessee, and elsewhere is shipped to WIPP for permanent disposal.
In January, WIPP resumed limited underground salt mining for the first time since the mine was taken offline following a pair of February 2014 accidents. The site reopened nearly three years later, and resumed taking waste from other DOE sites in April 2017.
WIPP received 133 shipments during its roughly nine months of waste operations in 2017.