The U.S. Energy Department expects in coming years to speed up the rate of waste emplacement at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico to 14 shipments per week, according to a newly released draft five-year strategic plan for the facility.
That would rise from a current rate of less than 10 shipments per week, according to the 26-page document posted late last week on the website for DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, which oversees the underground disposal site for the department’s transuranic waste.
The document was prepared by federal staff and outlines the agency’s goals through 2024. The emphasis during the period will be on upgrading infrastructure at WIPP, particularly construction of the Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System and accompanying utility shaft, acting Carlsbad Field Office Manager Kirk Lachman said in the report. The two projects together will cost more than $210 million.
The current underground ventilation system is now operating with filtered air at a reduced flow rate, “which cannot provide adequate air quality” to support simultaneous salt mining, waste emplacement, and maintenance, Lachman said. That has been the case since an underground radiation release in February 2014 that forced WIPP offline for almost three years.
The TRU waste disposal facility has operated under a “new normal” set of conditions since reopening in 2017, which means returning to pre-accident waste disposal in phases, Lachman said.
Once the new ventilation system is completed sometime around fiscal 2022, airflow should increase to about 540,000 cubic feet per minute. That would roughly triple the current level. It would also exceed the pre-2014 level of around 425,000 cubic feet per minute.
Increased ventilation should also help offset fumes from diesel equipment such as salt haul trucks and loaders underground. The disposal site received its first battery-electric vehicles this month and will continue to add more low-emission equipment, even after the upgrade, according to the report.
Within the next two to three years, work crews will finish waste disposal in WIPP Panel 7 and start using Panel 8. The site is currently authorized for 10 panels. The Energy Department will seek state and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approval for development of new underground panels, Lachman said. “We will focus on these objectives until they are completed to establish a path for TRU waste disposal through 2050.”
In general, both the underground and surface operations at WIPP include a significant amount of aging equipment that has exceeded its design life and must be replaced or refurbished, the plan says. The fire suppression system, which includes a 180,000-gallon water tank on the surface, is “degraded” but remains operable. The Energy Department wants to procure design and installation of key portions of the fire loop.
In addition, the information technology (IT) network at WIPP is old and needs to be replaced, according to the document.
“If the site network infrastructure is not updated to newer technology, client disconnects and disruption of network traffic will become much more frequent,” DOE said in the plan.
The agency wants to install an up-to-date system that will be more reliable and “meet all of the new cyber security requirements.” The document does not say what those requirements are.
The Energy Department wants a new fiber optic system “to support [data processing] speeds 100 times faster than the existing cabling.” The current setup only supports data at speeds of up to 1 Gbit/s, or 1 gigabit per second. A new system would enable WIPP to segregate different types of data and “improve the cyber security posture of the facility.”
The strategic plan does not say when the Energy Department and WIPP management contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership expect to carry out this IT modernization or how much it would cost.
Comments on the draft plan are due by Sept. 30 and can be emailed to [email protected].
Advocacy Groups Fear Mission Creep at WIPP
Representatives of two citizen groups that monitor nuclear installations in the state, the Southwest Research and Information Center (SRIC) and Nuclear Watch New Mexico (NukeWatch), said they have misgivings about the new plan after attending DOE-led public meetings this past week.
While WIPP was originally meant to operate 25 years, the planning theme has shifted to “WIPP forever,” said SRIC Administrator Don Hancock in an email.
The current cooperation agreement between the state and federal government still retains that 25-year limit, however, saying waste operations are expected to end in 2024, Hancock said. The plan also does not describe how many more panels will be needed to keep operating through 2050, he added.
During one of the public meetings, the Energy Department said it might seek nine new panels at WIPP. That was “news to me,” Scott Kovac, operations and research director for NukeWatch, said by email.
The plan also fails to offer much insight into how WIPP will handle more shipments of “remote-handled” waste, Hancock said. All but a handful of the shipments WIPP has received since reopening have been contact-handled material, which has a surface radiation dose of less than 200 millirem per hour, while remote-handled waste is 200 millirem or more.
Both citizen group officials mentioned their organizations are in ongoing litigation with the New Mexico Environment Department over how the DOE should be allowed to calculate underground TRU waste volume at WIPP.
The Energy Department and its contractor want to start counting volume based only on the radioactive TRU waste within the container, rather than basing it on the outermost container.
The state approved the change in December, and SRIC and NukeWatch appealed in January. The retroactive accounting change would reduce WIPP volume from roughly half full to one-third full of the maximum of 176,000 cubic meters of waste allowed by the Land Withdrawal Act.
During the public meetings, the Energy Department stressed its strategic planning document is a “conceptual” plan and not yet final, Hancock said.
