The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is accepting comments between now and Sept. 16 on the Department of Energy’s plans for two new disposal panels at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
The new panels will help the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) replace disposal capacity lost due to the February 2014 underground radiological release, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said in a July 16 Federal Register notice.
Panels 11 and 12 will connect to the existing salt mine disposal facility via the west main access drifts, or tunnels, currently under construction, EPA said in the notice. DOE has filed a “planned change request” for the new panels with EPA.
WIPP’s Bechtel-led prime contractor is disposing of defense-related transuranic waste in Panel 8. Due to radiological contamination from the accident and other factors, DOE has closed parts of the southern portion of the repository, including the canceled Panel 9, DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office Manager Mark Bollinger said in a March letter to EPA. The letter is among materials linked to by the Federal Register notice.
“Uninterrupted TRU [transuranic] waste-disposal operations at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant facility are vital to ensure that national TRU waste cleanup goals within the DOE complex are met,” Bollinger wrote.
After the 2014 accidents, WIPP lost access to the equivalent of about one-and-a-half panels, or about 27,000 cubic meters worth of disposal capacity. The Land Withdrawal Act allows WIPP to dispose of 6.2 million cubic feet or 175,564 cubic meters of disposal capacity, but did not set the number of disposal panels, according to DOE documents filed with EPA. Last spring, DOE said WIPP was less than half full.
EPA is charged by Congress with publishing regulations for disposal of spent nuclear fuel, including transuranic waste. EPA recertifies WIPP compliance every five years.
WIPP personnel started putting waste in Panel 7 in September 2013. Months later an underground salt haul truck caught fire on Feb. 5, 2014, which caused the underground ventilation system to reduce air flow. Subsequently, a radiological release from a ruptured Los Alamos National Laboratory drum in Room 7 of Panel 7 occurred on Feb. 14, 2014.
The incidents closed the mine for about three years, and DOE now has its sights set on returning WIPP waste emplacement to a pre-accident level, maybe as soon as 2025.
Meanwhile, WIPP is getting ready to accommodate waste streams that were not in DOE’s plans when the mine started taking in legacy transuranic waste in 1999. That includes plutonium from the Savannah River Site’s dilute-and-dispose program and, eventually, will include waste from the National Nuclear Security Administration’s program to produce new plutonium pits at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Savannah River.