LAS VEGAS — The Energy Department wants to build an above-ground waste-storage facility at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Calrsbad, N.M., and expects to submit an application to state regulators in the coming weeks, the agency’s top nuclear-waste-cleanup-policy regulator said here Wednesday.
“I would expect the permit mod would probably be submitted in the next few weeks here,” Frank Marcinowski, associate principal deputy secretary for regulatory and policy affairs for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, said in a brief interview following his keynote address here at the ExchangeMonitor’s 2016 RadWaste Summit.
DOE and its contractor, Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) were interested in building this facility even before the underground fire and later, unrelated, underground radiation leak that shut down the mine in 2014. Company and customer believe temporary storage space would allow the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) to continue receiving shipments of the radio-contaminated material known as transuranic waste even when the deep underground salt mine must close for periodic six-week maintenance outages — outages that happened even before the accident, when the mine was running at peak efficiency.
“The thought was if we had a capability to continue to receive waste, store it temporarily while we work through whatever the issues were, we could keep the pipeline moving and keep sites moving forward,” Jim Blankenhorn, WIPP deputy general manager and recovery manager for NWP, said in a Thursday interview on the floor of the RadWaste Summit.
When DOE’s permit modification request for the above-ground WIPP storage space arrives in Santa Fe, the New Mexico Environment Department must consider it “in a timely manner,” according to the terms of the more than $70 million settlement the state reached with DOE in January over the 2014 accidents.
New Mexico Environment Department spokeswoman Allison Majure did not reply to a request for comment by deadline Friday.
DOE aims to complete the above-ground WIPP waste storage facility by 2019, Marcinowski said in his Wednesday keynote address. The planned facility will be larger than the site’s existing 84,000 square-foot Waste Handling Building: a processing facility for mine-bound waste kludged into use as a storage depot after the nation’s only permanent disposal facility for transuranic waste shut down in 2014, Marcinowski told Weapons Complex Monitor.
“I think they’re designing it for like six or eight weeks of storage,” Marcinowski said.
As much a mine as it is a waste disposal facility, just keeping WIPP from collapsing on itself requires periodic maintenance — even between major outages — by diesel-burning equipment. Given the mine’s severely constrained underground airflow since the accidents, it is not possible to safely perform mine maintenance while simultaneously interring radioactive waste.
An interim ventilation system that came online at WIPP last month — it was originally scheduled to be ready in April, but some of its hardware had to be remanufactured due to poor workmanship, and other hardware was damaged during shipment to the mine — will boost underground airflow to over 110,000 cubic feet per minute from the current 60,000 cubic feet per minute.
A supplemental ventilation system expected to come online by June 30 of next year would boost underground airflow to about 180,000 cubic feet per minute. It would not be until a new permanent ventilation system comes online sometime in the next decade that DOE would be able to mine out more disposal space during waste emplacement operations.
The permanent ventilation system is expected to ring in at $270 million to $400 million. Blankenhorn said a 30-percent design review of the interim ventilation system is ongoing. According to a monthly site report released in July by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, that design review had been scheduled to wrap up in mid-August.
