Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) this week told the head of the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management that President Donald Trump did not propose a large enough 2018 budget for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP).
WIPP, the nation’s only deep-underground disposal facility for the radioactively contaminated material and equipment known as transuranic waste, would get some $323 million for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 if the budget request Trump sent to Capitol Hill on Tuesday becomes law.
A direct comparison with the budget WIPP got in the fiscal 2017 omnibus appropriations bill signed May 5 is difficult because DOE includes certain support functions in the site budgets it publishes in its budget request and Congress does not. However, core funding for WIPP’s Defense Environmental Cleanup mission would rise about 8 percent from the current appropriation if Trump’s budget passes.
However you slice it, the proposed appropriation was not enough for Heinrich, who in a Wednesday hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee told Susan Cange, DOE’s acting assistant secretary for environmental management, he would seek a boost for the site in the forthcoming fiscal 2018 National Defense Authorization Act.
“WIPP is reporting a backlog of about $25 million in FY 2018 for really key fire safety systems, for instruction, for infrastructure,” Heinrich said. “Your budget request of $323 [million] for [fiscal year] ‘18 is certainly below what I think WIPP needs with this point. I’ll be working to increase the funding.”
WIPP reopened in late December after a nearly three-year shutdown caused by an underground radiation release and earlier, unrelated underground fire. DOE resumed shipping transuranic waste to WIPP from other weapon sites early last month the first of which arrived on April 7.
For April, DOE emplaced just under two shipments a week at WIPP, according to the agency’s official shipment database. At Wednesday’s hearing, Cange said DOE is now sending three shipments a week to the facility and plans to ramp up to four per week by the end of 2017.
DOE would have to average about more than three shipments per week to meet its stated goal of sending 128 shipments to WIPP between April 2017 and January 2018.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s proposal to continue the Barack Obama administration’s policy of shutting down the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at DOE’s Savannah River Site has again stirred talk of sending tens of tons of diluted plutonium to WIPP in the future.
The South Carolina facility, commonly called MOX, was supposed to turn 34 metric tons of weapon-grade plutonium into fuel for commercial reactors under an arms-control pact with Russia finalized in 2010. Moscow walked away from that deal last year after the Obama administration decided to nix MOX and instead dilute the plutonium using the Savannah River Site’s existing facilities, then bury it at WIPP.
Frank Klotz, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, told lawmakers in a Thursday hearing of the House Armed Services Committee he toured WIPP earlier this month and came away “quite convinced that the 34 metric tons can fit within the WIPP facility.”
Opinions differ about whether WIPP can now or could in the future accomodate so much plutonium.
An industry source said then-Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz pressed New Mexico’s U.S. Senate delegation last year about a plan to send more plutonium to WIPP without altering the 1992 WIPP Land Withdrawal Act that gave the federal government the authority to store nuclear waste in the mine in the first place.
Moniz reportedly met with stiff pushback, the source said, though neither Heinrich nor his more senior colleague Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) have publicly commented on the meeting, or whether they themselves believe Congress would have to act to send the 34 metric tons of plutonium to WIPP in diluted form.
The Department of Energy has already interred some diluted plutonium from the former Rocky Flats Plant underground at WIPP, and just last month — according to the official Waste Data System/WIPP Waste Information System database — emplaced some contact-handled plutonium-oxide debris from Savannah River in the mine, though that waste is not part of the 34 metric-ton cache that would suddenly lack another path to disposal if MOX is canceled.
