Twenty-six containers of transuranic waste shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) for disposal years ago might not be buried there until 2018, the Energy Department disclosed on June 9 in a regulatory filing.
Hundreds of containers of transuranic waste — radioactively contaminated material and equipment produced by Cold War nuclear weapons programs — were marooned above ground at WIPP outside Carlsbad, N.M., in February 2014 after an accidental underground radiation release and earlier, unrelated underground fire at the deep-underground salt mine. The facility reopened last December.
The New Mexico Environment Department, primary state regulator for WIPP, gave DOE until June 30, 2017, to bury waste that arrived before the accidents. Most of the stranded waste, hundreds of containers by DOE’s count, have already been emplaced underground.
Last week, however, the federal agency told Santa Fe there were 26 containers in the mine’s above-ground Waste Handling Building that could not be cleared for burial by the end-of-June deadline. DOE asked New Mexico for permission to keep that waste above ground for up to another year, until June 30, 2018.
The Energy Department and WIPP operations contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership said they needed more time to ensure they could vet the 26 containers according to the strict new safety procedures established to prevent a repeat of the 2014 accidents. The “evaluation processes for these waste streams are new, very thorough, and time consuming,” the agency and its contractor wrote.
The process is apparently more consuming than the agency realized as recently as March, when Todd Shrader, manager of DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, told attendees of the annual Waste Management Symposium in Phoenix that the remaining above-ground waste at WIPP would be interred “in the next few weeks.”
Among other things, DOE is trying to certify that no potentially flammable material makes it underground at WIPP. The 2014 radiation release was blamed on an explosive chemical reaction between organic cat litter and nitrate salts.
The New Mexico Environment Department expected this week to receive the formal request from WIPP, and anticipates approving the extension, spokesman Allison Scott Majure said by email Wednesday.
Of the 26 problematic containers DOE wants to keep above ground for another year, 22 contain waste generated at the now-shuttered Rocky Flats plutonium pit-production facility in Colorado. The containers of inorganic sludge came to WIPP via the Idaho National Laboratory: a waystation that prepares much of DOE’s Cold War waste for permanent disposal in New Mexico.
Of the remaining four containers, three contain “heterogeneous debris” from the Mound Laboratory in Ohio, which came to WIPP via the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. Mound, a Cold War-era research lab that has since been closed down and cleaned up, produced bomb parts and later recovered tritium from retired nuclear weapons. Tritium recovered at Mound was purified at the Savannah River Site.
The last of the 26 containers holds “heterogeneous debris” from the Savannah River Site’s H Canyon facility: one of two identical facilities at the site once used to chemically isolate fissile materials for nuclear weapons. Nowadays, Savannah River’s canyons are used for nonproliferation projects, such as turning weapon-grade fissile material into fuel for commercial power plants.
Covert Takes Reins at WIPP Prime
Meanwhile, Bruce Covert has officially taken over as president and project manager of Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP), DOE announced Monday.
Covert replaces Philip Breidenbach, who oversaw WIPP’s recovery since 2015 and will return to one of NWP’s parent companies, AECOM.
“Breidenbach will return to AECOM to support other projects in the DOE and nuclear market,” according to a DOE press release.
AECOM announced the move May 4.
Covert takes over as DOE and Nuclear Waste Partnership prepare to ramp up waste disposal at WIPP from about two interments a week when the mine reopened in December to as many as five by the end of the year.
Covert was most recently AECOM group vice president and project director for waste management projects for Dounreay Site Restoration Ltd., the partnership leading cleanup and demolition of the former Dounreay fast reactor research and development site in Scotland. He has also worked for Washington Closure Hanford, the former river-corridor cleanup project contractor for DOE’s Hanford Site near Richland, Wash.
Covert comes on the scene with the base period of NWP’s WIPP management and operations contract set to expire Sept. 30. DOE holds a one-year option and a four-year option on the deal, which would be worth about $2 billion if the agency exercises both extensions.
WIPP reopened late last year after a nearly three-year hiatus following an accident underground radiation release blamed on a shoddily packaged barrel of transuranic waste from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico.
Restarting WIPP has cost DOE about $1.5 billion over roughly three years, including NWP’s management and operations contract. Returning underground ventilation back to pre-accident levels is expected to push the total bill for the recovery closer to $2 billion.
WIPP fared well in president Donald Trump’s 2018 budget request. The White House is seeking $323 million for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. The site got about $290 million for its defense environmental cleanup mission in the fiscal 2017 omnibus appropriations bill signed into law last month.
