EPA reopens WIPP public comment period

The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday said it indefinitely reopened a public comment period on the Department of Energy’s July request to expand the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.

“A request for an extension to the comment period was received from several stakeholders, most recently at the Agency’s informal public meetings held in New Mexico in late August,” The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wrote in a Federal Register notice published Tuesday. “EPA is reopening the comment period to seek public input on both DOE’s application and on what EPA should consider in its evaluation.”

The comment period “will remain open until the Agency publishes a future notice in the Federal Register that specifies the end of the public comment period,” EPA wrote in the notice. DOE filed an EPA change request for the expansion in July. The first 60-day comment period on the request ran out in September. 

DOE wants to mine out two new waste disposal areas, panels 11 and 12, at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), the agency’s deep-underground repository for transuranic waste: material and items contaminated with elements heavier than uranium, often plutonium. WIPP workers started mining out space for the new panels in late 2023.

In fiscal year 2024, which ran through Sept. 30, shipments of legacy transuranic waste to WIPP topped the year-ago count. WIPP has now been reopened for more than seven years, following a three-year closure stemming from an underground fire and radiation release in 2014.

After finishing disposal in the contaminated Panel 7, the site of the Valentine’s Day release a decade ago, WIPP workers are now filling up Panel 8.