The Department of Energy is seeking another five-year certification from the Environmental Protection Agency for its Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
The WIPP Land Withdrawal Act requires EPA recertification every five years to ensure the site’s compliance with federal radioactive waste disposal requirements, according to an executive summary of the application. The package provides new data on the underground repository, its waste inventory, and key changes since the last update.
Ultimately, the EPA will produce an analysis on the potential release of radionuclides over a 10,000-year performance period. Natural and engineered features of the disposal system will be considered.
The site was first certified for permanent disposal of transuranic waste in 1998 and received its first shipment the next year.
Since 2013, the following facilities have been approved to send TRU waste to WIPP: The Idaho National Laboratory and its Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project; the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois; the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico; the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee; the Savannah River Site in South Carolina; and Waste Control Specialists in West Texas.
The Environmental Protection Agency can “modify, revise, or suspend” the certification, EPA supervisory environmental scientist Thomas Peake said Tuesday during a two-day meeting in Washington, D.C., of the National Academies’ Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board.
The agency has six months to take action after it decides the application is complete, Peake said. However, the process could take much longer if the EPA decides to modify the certification, he added.
The National Academies panel is weighing the viability of DOE’s conceptual plans for disposing of surplus plutonium at WIPP under the U.S.-Russian 2000 Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement.
The application before the EPA does not include a DOE plan for how WIPP would accommodate 34 metric tons of surplus plutonium, diluted and downblended into transuranic waste. The Energy Department is pursuing “dilute and dispose” after last year canceling the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, which would have turned the material into nuclear reactor fuel.
The recertification review includes consideration of DOE plans for a new ventilation shaft, along with additional waste-storage panels beyond the 10 already planned, Peake said.
Conceivably, if it finds the facility inadequate, it could order a halt to operations, although that is unlikely, Peake told the board. Overall, “WIPP is a robust disposal system,” he said.
Peake said the recent change in waste-disposal accounting at WIPP, under which only the material itself counts against the volume cap set by the Land Withdrawal Act, should not imperil EPA recertification.
The Energy Department filed its last application for WIPP in March 2014, the month after an underground radiation release forced the facility offline for about three years. The WIPP facility eventually received the recertification in 2017.
During a public participation portion of the National Academies meeting, the administrator of the New Mexico-based advocacy group Southwest Research and Information Center, Don Hancock, said keeping WIPP open until about 2050 would drive up long-term expenses for the DOE Office of Environmental Management. The disposal facility has an official closure date of 2033, and money for the extra years of operation would need to be accounted for, he said.
The Energy Department has indicated the actual closure date for WIPP is a fluid target, and could extend well beyond 2033.
