The Energy Department will close the southern end of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) after several ceiling collapses in the underground nuclear waste storage facility, a DOE official said Thursday.
Todd Shrader, manager of DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, made the bombshell announcement in the final 10 minutes of a nearly two-hour town hall meeting webcast from Carlsbad, N.M., some 40 miles west of WIPP by road.
Shrader said DOE and WIPP prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) have been discussing a partial mine closure for months, but that momentum to pull the trigger increased in recent weeks — during which NWP personnel discovered three separate ceiling collapses in the mine’s disused and radioactive southern end.
DOE and NWP now will seal off all areas of WIPP south the east-west hallway numbered 2750. That will permanently cut off access to the the mine’s four southernmost waste disposal panels, which were filled with nuclear waste and sealed up years ago.
The move means the agency no longer can use hallway space in the mine’s southern end for eventual waste disposal. That space equates to about three rooms of storage, but with more south-end collapses likely, preserving access to the space is at this point too expensive and too dangerous, Shrader said. In WIPP parlance, a room is an underground area roughly the size of a football field.
Shrader did not say when DOE and its contractor would start sealing off WIPP’s southern end, but noted the process would take “maybe four or five weeks at the most,” once it begins. Permanently closing any part of WIPP requires approval from both the New Mexico Environment Department and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Reached by email Friday, New Mexico Environment Department spokeswoman Allison Majure had no immediate comment about the impending closure of WIPP’s southern end. Likewise reached by email Friday, Tricia Lynn in the Environmental Protection Agency’s public affairs office in Washington, D.C. had no immediate comment.
Despite the decision to close part of WIPP permanently, and despite the labor, time and expense involved, Shrader gave no indication Thursday that the mine’s long-awaited reopening would be delayed beyond the planned December reopening date. The department has stubbornly clung to the date this year, despite a string of setbacks and an abundance of schedule-stretching, margin-busting caution exercised during the home stretch of what is now more than two years of recovery from a pair of serious underground accidents.
WIPP, the nation’s only permanent disposal facility for the radioactive material and equipment known as transuranic waste, accepted its first waste shipment in 1999 and has been closed since 2014, following an accidental underground radiation release and earlier, unrelated underground fire.
Both accidents occurred in the mine’s southern end, prompting DOE and NWP to restrict access to the area and cease the preventive maintenance there that is necessary to prevent WIPP’s naturally shifting walls and ceilings from collapsing.
It took nine months after the accident before NWP personnel could think about going back into the now-radioactive southern end of the mine to install reinforcing bolts needed to ward off ceiling collapses, NWP mining expert John VandeKraats said during the Thursday town hall.
In essence, VandeKraats said, the 2014 accidents put NWP behind the eight ball, forcing the contractor to first stand by idly while WIPP’s southern walls and ceilings shifted and sank, then play catch-up, and ultimately triage with the shifting salt.
When it comes to structural maintenance underground, VandeKraats said, it’s “pay me now, or pay me a whole lot more later.”
