The Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant could run out of space if the number of waste drums bound for the New Mexico site keeps increasing, or if a new underground accounting system is thrown out by the courts, the Government Accountability Office said Thursday.
The report landed as the site, DOE’s only deep-underground transuranic-waste repository, grapples with delays to a new ventilation system and a new utility shaft. The mine near Carlsbad, N.M., needs both so that workers can simultaneously dispose of more waste while excavating space for future waste shipments.
If finished on time, the projects would return the Waste Isolation Pilot (WIPP) plant to what the Government Accountability Office (GAO) called “clean” operations in 2023.
But on Wednesday, citing COVID-19, the New Mexico Environment Department refused to extend a temporary authorization that would have allowed WIPP prime nuclear waste partnership to continue excavating the utility shaft.
Stephanie Stringer, director of the state department’s resource protection division, pointed to a rash of new COVID-19 cases at WIPP, and a New Mexico order limiting activities during the ongoing pandemic.
WIPP has been limited to disposing of 10 shipments a week since reopening in 2017 from a three-year closure sparked by an underground radiation release and an equipment fire. After the accident, WIPP prime Nuclear Waste Partnership began filtering mine air, which limited airflow and forced an operational choice between limited disposal options or mine-expansion.
The new safety significant ventilation system would provide enough filtered air for both activities to go full-throttle side-by-side, but in August, Nuclear Waste Partnership’s August terminated the construction firm it hired in 2018 to build the system. The fired subcontractor quickly sued over the decision, and the prime has said it hopes to award a contract soon and is using Kiewit Construction on certain ventilation work in the interim.
Together, the utility shaft and the ventilation systems will cost a combined $288 million or so, DOE estimates. In its report Thursday, which did not directly mention the latest complications with the ventilation system, GAO said DOE should improve its planning for adding underground disposal panels to WIPP.
Looming over all of this, DOE faces the prospect that a court could strike down changes the agency made two years ago to the way it accounts for waste volumes at WIPP: a change crucial to the government’s plans to cram an expanding volume of radioactive material into legally finite space.
The new method discounts empty space in some waste containers so that the waste volume, as measured by DOE, does not include every cubic centimeter of every drum in the underground.
Underground space will be at even more of a premium at WIPP this decade after DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration restart production of plutonium pits, fissile nuclear weapon cores. That will create a new stream of transuranic waste that will have first priority for emplacement at WIPP, which mostly is filled with waste from shuttered Cold War and Manhattan Project weapons production sites.
As of January 2020, DOE had filled most available space in WIPP’s seven underground disposal panels, while construction on an eighth should be finished in 2021 and filled with transuranic waste by 2025. The current thinking at DOE’s Office of Environmental Management is that WIPP will need to continue accepting waste through 2050 or later.
But the agency has ditched plans for disposal in two panels in the early WIPP blueprints because of safety issues created by the 2014 accidents, GAO said. In order to add on additional panels, the Department of Energy must design additional panels and get them approved by both New Mexico and the Environmental Protection Agency, GAO said Thursday.
There are also other issues complicating life around WIPP, the GAO said.
Among them is keeping needed staff in place for key Department of Energy and contractor jobs. In January of this year, 27 of the 76 total full-time positions at DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office were either vacant or occupied on an acting basis by someone doing another job in the office.
Hiring has never been easy at WIPP, GAO said, given that the Carlsbad area is a “remote location in southeastern New Mexico, hundreds of miles from the closest large cities, including Albuquerque and Santa Fe.” In addition, staffing at the site was increased following the 2014 accidents. Also, in the past couple of years, a booming local oil and natural gas industry — which has slacked off somewhat this year during the pandemic — has lured away many WIPP employees due to higher pay.
GAO conducted its latest performance audit on WIPP April 2019 to November 2020.
