Four federal nuclear sites and one privately operated waste disposal facility will send a total of 128 shipments of transuranic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) from April 2017 to January 2018, the Energy Department announced Tuesday.
These will be the first waste shipments to WIPP following the February 2014 underground fire and earlier, unrelated radiation release that shuttered the mine for nearly three years. The facility reopened in December, and must inter waste stranded above ground following the accidents before accepting any new shipments.
DOE would not say this week which sites would ship first, or in which order they would send their waste to WIPP.
“The exact allocation and sequence for shipping will be adjusted based on the emplacement rate at WIPP, operational needs at the WIPP and generator sites, and logistical issues (such as weather) that affect shipping,” the agency wrote in a Tuesday press release.
From April to January, DOE projects shipments to WIPP from:
- Idaho Site: 61 shipments.
- Oak Ridge Site, Tenn.: 24 shipments.
- Savannah River Site, S.C.: Eight shipments.
- Waste Control Specialists, Texas: 11 shipments.
- Los Alamos Site, N.M.: 24 shipments.
Idaho state officials had expected their shipments to go first, or at least early. The state Attorney General’s Office did not reply to a request for comment this week. Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden has repeatedly refused to let DOE send any more waste into the Idaho National Laboratory until the agency makes good on its legal obligations to ship waste out.
Idaho has the largest backlog of transuranic waste in the DOE complex, with some 14,000 cubic meters that will take up nearly 22,000 cubic meters once packaged for permanent disposal at WIPP. That is roughly enough to fill up about 200 53-foot tractor trailers. Given the low disposal rate of which WIPP is currently capable, it is doubtful DOE will be able to remove all transuranic waste from Idaho by the end of 2018, as a legally binding cleanup agreement with the state requires.
As of Dec. 31, 2015, there were nearly 45,000 cubic meters of contact-handled transuranic waste stored across 14 sites in DOE’s nuclear complex, plus almost another 2,500 cubic meters of the more dangerous, more radioactive remote-handled transuranic waste at 11 sites, according to the agency’s 2016 Annual Transuranic Waste Inventory Report. That does not count waste yet to be exhumed or packaged for shipment.
DOE headquarters in Washington did respond to multiple requests for comment this week. The four DOE sites identified on the early bird shipping list released Tuesday deferred queries about shipping dates to headquarters for comment.
A spokesperson for Waste Control Specialists also deferred to DOE headquarters for comment.
Waste Control Specialists stores more than 100 containers of inappropriately remediated nitrate salts from the Los Alamos National Laboratory under a $25-million contract with WIPP prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership. The pact expires in March, and while neither DOE, Nuclear Waste Partnership, nor Waste Control Specialists will confirm it, the agency’s intention to accept shipments from the company after April suggests the deal has been or will be extended.
The Los Alamos salts Waste Control Specialists is storing are essentially identical to the waste that exploded underground at WIPP and leaked radiation into the mine three years ago. Only about 30 of the containers now at Waste Control Specialists meet both the Transportation Department’s regulations for over-the-road shipment and WIPP’s strict new waste acceptance criteria, a source in New Mexico said this week. DOE’s tentative plan is to clean up the other 70-plus containers in Texas using a yet-to-be-funded mobile cleanup system developed at Los Alamos, the source said, citing conversations with department officials.
Further details about WIPP’s shipping queue and the mobile nitrate-salt cleanup system might emerge at the next quarterly WIPP town hall meeting at Carlsbad City Council Chambers in Carlsbad, N.M. DOE and Nuclear Waste Partnership will co-host that meeting at 7:30 p.m. Eastern time on March 16, according to Tuesday’s press release. The meeting will also stream online.
Meanwhile, underground …
DOE and Nuclear Waste Partnership continued to sort out some paperwork this week required to seal off WIPP’s disused southern end, which no longer figures into the agency’s waste storage plans.
In a Monday filing with the New Mexico Environment Department, DOE and Nuclear Waste Partnership told their primary state regulator they already have permission they sought last year to forgo environmental monitoring in parts of the mine slated for closure.
In the filing, the permittees maintained they are still excused from inspecting the mine’s disused southern end and from monitoring the space for hazardous gases under a 2014 administrative order from the state, and therefore rescinded a request they filed in November asking the state to keep these exemptions in place.
“The Permittees have determined that this [temporary authorization] is not needed in order to proceed with isolating the far south end of the underground repository,” Todd Shrader and Philip Breidenbach, respectively the head of DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office and Nuclear Waste Partnership president, wrote wrote in a Feb. 13 filing with the New Mexico Environment Department.
The New Mexico Environment Department did not respond to a request for comment this week.
The state’s 2014 order allowed DOE and NWP to suspend certain requirements of their WIPP operating permit in parts of the mine that were inaccessible after the 2014 accidents.
These days, WIPP’s southern end is so prone to cave-ins after going years without routine maintenance that workers are no longer allowed there. The mine’s naturally shifting salt walls and ceilings are seen as a virtue for secure, long-term storage, but in the near term they require constant maintenance to prevent collapse.
DOE and NWP have said closing WIPP’s southern end will allow them to focus resources on ramping up waste disposal, improving underground airflow, and eventually mining out more disposal space in the mine. The southern end includes four of WIPP’s seven main waste disposal areas, called panels. Each fully mined panel includes six smaller disposal rooms that are 100 yards long.
Editor’s note, 02/24/2017, 8:30 a.m.: the story now includes the correct amount of contact-handled transuranic waste stored at the Idaho Site, according to DOE’s 2016 Annual Transuranic Waste Inventory Report.
