The Department of Energy has finished its annual assessment of the Richland Operations Office’s program for characterizing transuranic waste bound from the Hanford Site in Washington state for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico, the agency’s Carlsbad Field Office wrote in a letter to Monday to a New Mexico official.
The Carlsbad Field Office, which oversees WIPP, audited the Hanford Site Central Characterization Program May 31 through June 1, according to a letter to John Kieling, chief of the New Mexico Environment Department’s Hazardous Waste Bureau in Sante Fe, from Todd Schrader, manager of the Carlsbad Field Office.
The letter was posted on DOE’s website; the audit itself was not.
Each year, DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office reviews whether the cleanup sites managed by the agency’s Office of Environmental Management are following DOE rules for identifying transuranic waste from legacy nuclear weapons development programs and properly preparing the waste for safe shipment to WIPP. However, transuranic waste processing programs across the DOE complex have been largely suspended since WIPP closed in 2014 after an underground fire and later, unrelated underground radiation release.
DOE and WIPP prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership are two months behind a public schedule for WIPP reopening; a critical document that governs the mine’s new safety procedures was approved in May, rather than late February, as listed on the public schedule. Both DOE and its contractor insist WIPP will reopen in December.