Improving low shipping rates at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico and awarding a new prime contract are high priority issues for the disposal site, Reinhard Knerr, DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office manager, said in a recent town meeting.
“And finally, we expect transition to the new M&O [management and operations] contractor sometime this fiscal year,” Knerr said during the hybrid meeting Thursday.
Nuclear Waste Partnership, a team of Amentum and BWX Technologies, has run the underground transuranic waste disposal facility since October 2012 and will be there at least through this September, according to a DOE contract webpage updated last week. The value of the current deal is $2.7 billion.
It has been more than a year since the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management solicited bids for a follow-on contract. Suitors are believed to include a venture led by Huntington Ingalls Industries, a Fluor-Amentum joint venture and teams of Jacobs-Atkins and Bechtel-BWXT, according to industry sources.
Meanwhile, another key goal at the mine is to raise shipment rates to closer to the 700-to-800 annually recorded at WIPP during the mid-to-late 2000s, prior to a February 2014 underground radiation leak that contaminated parts of the salt mine and kept WIPP idle for about three years, Knerr said.
So far during fiscal 2022, which started Sept. 1, WIPP has disposed of only 150 shipments, far below the goal of about 300, Knerr said.
Disposal could commence this fall in a new area, Panel 8, in which workers will not have to wear as much protective gear as they do now because the panel was not contaminated by the 2014 accident, WIPP officials said. COVID-related absenteeism and other pandemic related issues that have slowed underground operations are also receding, WIPP officials have said.
