DOE Looking At Initial Restart in 2016 for $242 Million
Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
10/3/2014
The resumption of full-scale operations at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant may not occur until 2019 and could cost up to $551 million, though a Department of Energy WIPP Recovery Plan released this week calls for initial operations to resume in early 2016 at a cost of about $242 million. Operations at WIPP have been suspended since February, when a haul truck fire and subsequent radiological release shut down the plant, leading to complex-wide impacts to DOE’s transuranic waste program. After the restart in 2016, operations will initially be limited by airflow underground until the installation of a new permanent ventilation system and construction of a new exhaust shaft. “I anticipate on the outer limit three years from the start of initial operations to have those projects in place, but right now that is a planning estimate only,” acting Assistant Secretary of Energy for Environmental Management Mark Whitney said in a call with reporters this week.
Those two efforts will be capital asset project line items and after initial operations should take two-to-three years to complete under DOE’s project management process, Whitney said. The new ventilation system is estimated to run between $65 million and $261 million, while the exhaust shaft is expected to cost between $12 million and $48 million. That would be on top of the $242 million DOE estimates it will need to restart initial operations. The recovery plan detailed this week the first official timeline and cost estimate for WIPP recovery.
Questions Remain on Root Cause of WIPP Release
The Department has still not identified with certainty the root cause of the radiological release at WIPP, though New Mexico officials have stressed that will be a condition for resuming operations. Officials said this week that DOE’s Accident Investigation Board investigation into the root cause of the event should be complete by the end of this year. “The schedule will continue to be refined as recovery activities are performed and additional information is learned,” the recovery plan states. “The current schedule is aggressive, and the Department will continue to look for opportunities to accelerate activities and execute work in parallel, reducing the time needed for critical activities.”
However, safety will be a priority over schedule, according to Whitney, who noted that any additional findings from the Accident Investigation Board will be incorporated into the recovery plan. “We don’t want to establish artificial schedules that would run counter to our focus on safety. We know what actions we need to undertake to get to initial operations and the airflow that we need to establish for the increased ventilation are the first two phases of that. That is our current focus,” he said.
First Waste to be Disposed of Will be Material at Site
The first phase for increasing ventilation calls for the installation of two skid-mounted fan/HEPA filter units, which will allow additional heavy equipment to operate in the underground to perform both cleanup and maintenance work such as roof bolting. In the second phase, supplemental ventilation will be added through a reconfiguration of bulkheads and fans, which will allow for limited mining and initial waste emplacement. The longer-term third phase of ventilation upgrades include the new ventilation system and exhaust shaft and will allow WIPP to operate at the airflow capacity of before the incidents.
The first waste to be disposed of after the resumption of operations will be waste already at WIPP, including waste generated from recovery activities and containers from around the complex that were at the site awaiting emplacement when the incidents occurred. After that, DOE will need to prioritize shipments of waste from other sites to WIPP. “The number of shipments that can be processed will increase as supported by ventilation improvements and equipment,” the recovery plan states.
Before the resumption of operations, the New Mexico Environment Department has required WIPP to close two open waste panels containing nitrate-salt bearing waste that has been linked to the release. Panel 6 is now scheduled to be closed in the first quarter of fiscal year 2015 while Panel 7, Room 7 will be closed by mid FY’15, according to the plan.
90 Percent of the Mine Not Contaminated
The Department is currently evaluating decontamination methods at Idaho National Laboratory for the salt in WIPP’s underground. However, the vast majority of the mine is expected to be clean. “Based on what we know right now and what we understand of the incident that occurred, we expect that probably 90 percent or more of the underground won’t be contaminated,” Whitney said. “Once we understand the extent of the contamination we’ll have a better idea of what our approach to decontaminating will be.”
Instead of removing the contamination, it will be fixed in place. That could mean spraying the salt with water, which “provides a crust layer on top so that the contamination is driven down into the salt,” Whitney said. On the floor areas, the salt can be covered with alternate layers of colored sealant and then covered with new salt. “Depending on where it is, we may also pursue a fixative, but we just don’t know enough yet about the extent of the contamination and how bad it may or may not be in certain areas,” Whitney said. “Once we do we’ll know if we need to apply a fixative, particularly in areas where equipment may disturb the salt. In those cases, if we’re going to be using heavy equipment we may want to apply fixative instead of using a water spray.
