The Energy Department late Friday appeared to hedge its timetable for reopening the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., following a major announcement last week that the agency would permanently seal off the mine’s southern end following a series of ceiling collapses there.
“Closure of this area will not affect reopening preparations and waste emplacement activities, nor will it limit the ability of the facility to operate when it reopens,” according to a statement posted to the WIPP website. “DOE is committed to reopening WIPP in a safe and timely fashion.”
Public timetables shared by DOE and WIPP prime contract Nuclear Waste Partnership this summer indicate the facility — the nation’s only permanent disposal ground for the rad-contaminated material and equipment known as transuranic waste — will reopen in either December or January, and begin accepting new waste shipments from DOE sites across the country by April.
These dates were absent from DOE’s Friday statement, which was posted online after deadline for the ExchangeMonitor’s weekly newsletters. WIPP personnel discovered three partial ceiling collapses between late September and early October, including one in an area where a collapse occurred in January 2015. No one was hurt in the cave-ins, which happened in areas where DOE has largely finished storing waste, and which workers were either not allowed to access, or required special permission to enter.
The Department of Energy needs regulatory approval from both the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the New Mexico Environment Department to close even a part of WIPP. In its Friday statement, DOE said it had “initiated discussions” with both organizations last week, prior to the agency’s Thursday announcement that it would permanently shutter WIPP’s south end.
EPA spokeswoman Tricia Lynn, in a Friday email that arrived after deadline, wrote that “as part of regular communications, DOE management alerted EPA management that this possibility was under consideration.
“DOE will need to submit a written request including exact plans and technical supporting materials,” Lynn said. “EPA will evaluate those materials, and may request additional analyses, as it considers whether to approve DOE’s request.”
It will take four or five weeks to seal off WIPP’s southern end for good, once the work actually starts, Todd Shrader, manager of DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, said Thursday in a town hall meeting webcast from Carlsbad.
Shrader did not say when this work would begin. DOE plans to seal off all areas south of the east-west access drift numbered 2750. This would permanently erase access to about three football fields’ worth of hallway space that could have been used for future waste storage. Shrader said Thursday it is too expensive and too dangerous to save that space, which in any event DOE would not need for years.
