After a pause this summer, the contractor for the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., expects during the first week of October to resume salt mining to dig out more disposal space.
This will be the first mining in storage Panel 8 since July 22, according to Nuclear Waste Partnership spokesman Donavan Mager.
Mining was suspended so DOE and its contractor could remedy roof bolting and other ground control issues in other parts of the underground transuranic waste site, they told the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) in August.
Ground control is a mining term for upkeep of underground shafts, intended to keep evacuation routes open and protect workers from being hurt or killed by falling rock. The Energy Department is supposed to submit a report on WIPP ground control to both congressional Appropriations committees within 60 days of President Donald Trump signing the fiscal 2019 “minibus” funding bill that covers the Department of Energy. Congress last week passed the legislation, which includes $7.2 billion for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management in the budget year beginning Oct. 1.
In January of this year, salt mining resumed for the first time since an underground fire and radiological release in February 2014 closed WIPP for about three years. But progress is slower than DOE had envisioned. The agency had hoped to mine 50,000 tons of salt from Panel 8 in fiscal 2018, but as of July had only excavated 17,000 tons.
One obstacle is having only one operating continuous mining machine at the WIPP underground. However, Nuclear Waste Partnership is adding more workers and machinery, “to allow for a backshift to perform mining in addition to the day shift, which was the original plan,” Mager said.
In October workers will do maintenance on, and power, up a continuous miner used at WIPP prior to February 2014. In addition, a procurement contract is being placed to obtain a rebuilt continuous miner, which could be deployed within six to eight months, bringing the total continuous miners to three.
The site’s current underground airflow of roughly 150,000 cubic feet per minute cannot support simultaneous mining, waste emplacement, and maintenance, DOE Carlsbad Field Office Manager Todd Shrader said last week at the National Cleanup Workshop in Alexandria, Va.
Energy Department and NWP officials said at the conference they expect a construction announcement in October for a $288 million ventilation system that would boost airflow to more than 500,000 cubic feet per minute. Construction should start in December, with the system becoming operational as soon as 2021, Shrader said.
Waste disposal continues in Panel 7 at WIPP. Panel 8 is due to open in 2021. Work is still on track to complete mining Panel 8 prior to Panel 7 being filled, Mager said.
After its extended shutdown, WIPP began accepting waste shipments from other DOE facilities in April 2017. Since that time, it has received 365 shipments, according to the latest publicly available data.
The big majority of the shipments, 266, have come from the Idaho National Laboratory, 57 from Oak Ridge in Tennessee, 31 from Waste Control Specialists in Texas, 10 from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and 1 from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
