The Department of Energy expects the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant could receive up to 14 shipments of transuranic material a week in fiscal year 2022, which starts Oct. 1.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management rate of shipments to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) should go from 10 per week to 14 per week of operation thanks in part to the scheduled opening of Panel 8 in fiscal 2022, according budget justification material for the Joe Biden administration’s $7.6-billion request for the nuclear cleanup office.
In addition, the agency is buying more “Type-B” over-the-highway transport containers for hauling the defense-related transuranic waste from DOE generator sites.
William (Ike) White, the acting assistant secretary for environmental management, cited the 14-shipment per week goal in his presentation last week to the Energy Facilities Contractors Group.
On the face of it, the 14 shipments per week appears an ambitious goal given recent performance. WIPP does not receive waste shipments for probably eight weeks or more during the year due to various factors including a regular maintenance outage that can run for a month or more together with weather outages and federal, state, local and tribal holidays.
The disposal facility received waste during 44 of the 52 weeks in the 2020 calendar year, a WIPP spokesperson said in an email Wednesday.
If WIPP receives waste for 40 weeks out of the year and averages 14 weekly shipments, it would translate to 560 shipments in a 12-month period. However, the best WIPP has been able to manage since reopening in 2017 after a roughly three-year suspension due to a February 2014 underground radiation leak is 311 shipments in calendar year 2018.
For about the first eight months of the pandemic-ravaged 2021 fiscal year, Oct. 1, 2020 through May 28, the disposal site has received only 120 shipments, according to WIPP’s public website.
The Biden administration requested $430 million in WIPP funding during fiscal 2022, up from the $413 million enacted by Congress for the 2021 budget year.
Specifically, the DOE plan requests $55 million, or $20 million more than the fiscal 2021 enacted spending, for continued construction of the Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System.
The system, currently scheduled for operation around 2025, should increase underground airflow to 540,000 cubic feet per minute. The current level is less than 200,000 feet per minute. The new underground ventilation system should enable WIPP to return to pre-2014 emplacement capacity of upwards of 700 shipments per year, plus allow miners to hollow out new disposal panels while waste emplacement is going on.
The budget also calls for investing in more zero-emissission electric-battery underground equipment in order to reduce fumes inhaled by workers.
During fiscal 2022, shipments are expected from the Idaho National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and potentially other sites, according to the budget documentation.
Idaho remains the top priority shipper to WIPP under a 2019 update to a 1995 legal settlement between the state and the feds that aims to remove all legacy transuranic waste from Idaho National Laboratory by 2030. In 2028, around the time Idaho transfers are winding down, the Hanford Site in Washington state expects to restart its shipments to WIPP. It last moved transuranic waste to the disposal site in 2011.
Meanwhile, WIPP has temporarily stopped taking drums from the National Nuclear Security Administration operations at Los Alamos after personnel there detected sparks in a waste drum on Feb. 26.
WIPP Receives 70 TRU Shipments During First Five Months of 2021
Last month, WIPP received 20 shipments, equal to the throughput of May 2020, when operations scaled back due to COVID-19, and about half of the 42 logged during the pre-virus days of May 2019, according to figures from WIPP’s public website.
The defense-related transuranic waste site is run by Nuclear Waste Partnership, a team of Amentum and BWX Technologies with Orano as a key subcontractor. Earlier this month DOE published a final request for proposals for a new management and operations contract potentially worth $3 billion over 10 years..
During the first five months of 2019, WIPP received 125 shipments. During 2020 the figure was 67 for the same five-month period. During 2021, there have been 70 for the same stretch.
Of the 2021 WIPP shipments, 42 came from the Idaho National Laboratory, 23 from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, four from the Oak Ridge Site and one from Waste Control Specialists in Texas.
There are still 74 containers, holding 262 inner drums of transuranic material from Los Alamos, stored at Waste Control Specialists in Andrews County, Texas and the stranded waste will likely remain into fiscal 2022, which starts Oct. 1, according to the White House budget request justification. Some require treatment before being sent onto WIPP to ensure the drums are not at risk of rupturing, as happened in 2014 when a Los Alamos drum leaked radiation into WIPP’s underground.
There were originally more than 300 containers of the Los Alamos waste, rerouted to Waste Control Specialists rather than WIPP, in 2014. Most have been deemed safe and sent onto WIPP. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has been pushing DOE since late 2019 to prioritize removal of the remaining containers from Texas.
DOE’s White has publicly said that the federal agency is serious about moving the stranded waste out of Andrews County, but it will take time. Texas has agreed to revise a state license, allowing the drums to stay at Waste Control Specialists until Dec. 23, 2022.
