The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant could go offline for a major ventilation upgrade right around the time the Los Alamos National Laboratory starts casting new nuclear weapon cores and generating a slew of new defense transuranic waste, a lab official said Wednesday at the online Waste Management Symposia conference.
“As we progress in our nuclear production mission, the amount of [transuranic] waste we’re going to generate is going to be significantly higher, compared to what we’re generating today,” Peter Carson, deputy division leader for nuclear process infrastructure for Triad, said during a panel discussion Wednesday. “And if you look at the peak in the 2023, 2024 timeframe, that also happens to be about the time WIPP [the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant] is going down for a major ventilation upgrade.”
Carson manages national security waste at Los Alamos, which plans to cast 10 war reserve pits, fissile weapon cores, in fiscal year 2024. Around that time, planned pit operations at the lab’s PF-4 facility will pump out somewhere between 400 cubic meters and 500 cubic meters of transuranic waste, up from about 300 cubic meters in 2020.
“[W]e’ll be generating the most waste at the time when we might not be able to ship very much of it,” said Carson.
By 2030, when Los Alamos plans to ramp up to 30 pits a year, the lab thinks transuranic waste generation from pits will level off at somewhere between 200 cubic meters and 300 cubic meters a year, according to Carson’s chart — which he cautioned the audience not to take “too much to heart, because it changes annually as we try to redo the flow sheets and we try to solve problems.”
WIPP, near Carlsbad, N.M., is the DOE’s only permanent, deep-underground repository for transuranic waste: material and equipment contaminated by elements heavier than uranium. DOE’s Office of Environmental Management owns WIPP and is the main user of the facility, sending waste there from shuttered World War II and Cold War-era nuclear weapons sites around the country.
In 2017, WIPP reopened from a roughly three-year outage caused by an underground radiation release from an improperly packaged container of transuranic waste from Los Alamos. The container blew its top underground after an internal combustion. Now, WIPP needs a new ventilation system so DOE can simultaneously mine out new underground disposal space and bury waste at the same clip as it did before the accident.
WIPP disposed of 724 shipments of transuranic waste in 2013, the last full year of operation before the major accident. In a COVID-hobbled 2020, WIPP received only 192 shipments, down 100 from 2019. On Tuesday, a DOE official said WIPP’s new ventilation system could cost between $400 million and $450 million, before an ongoing rebaselining. The goal is to increase airflow in the underground salt mine to 540,000 cubic feet per minute from 170,000 cubic feet per minute.
