PHOENIX – The Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico has since 2017 received only half as many transuranic waste shipments annually as it did prior to a February 2014 underground radiation leak that halted operations for three years – but that could soon change, officials said Wednesday.
Encouraged by the startup of a new disposal panel and progress on key infrastructure, DOE hopes the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) can soon match pre-accident shipment levels.
“Right now, we are hitting 14 [shipments per week of operation] pretty regularly,” Kenneth Princen, an assistant manager for DOE’s national transuranic waste program directed by the WIPP complex near Carlsbad.
The goal is to consistently reach 17 shipments per week, Princen said. Given that WIPP typically operates 40 weeks per year, accounting for various government and tribal holidays, weather and maintenance-related outages, this would raise WIPP’s annual shipments to about 680 per year.
While WIPP finished 2022 and started 2023 strong with 53 shipments received during December and 31 in January. The challenge will be keeping those numbers up over time.
WIPP received 272 shipments during calendar year 2022 and has only exceeded 300 shipments per year once since coming back online in 2017, according to the public website for the underground mine.
In November, WIPP started emplacing waste in Panel 8, which unlike the now-filled Panel 7, was not contaminated when a drum from the Los Alamos National Laboratory ruptured in February 2014. So workers no longer have to wear so much protective gear when disposing of transuranic waste underground, DOE has said.
The feds are spending more than $1 billion at WIPP over 10 years to improve the disposal site infrastructure, said Mark Bollinger, the acting manager for DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office. This includes the Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System, which should open in late 2025 or early 2026 and triple underground airflow to about 540,000 cubic feet per minute.
The DOE and Bechtel prime Salado Isolation Mining plan to avoid a months-long outage to install a new electric substation, Princen said. Managers plan “micro-outages of a few days or a week or two here or there,” he added.
