The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is making shipments of transuranic waste to the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, a lab spokesman said Monday.
Three shipments left Lawrence Livermore for WIPP during the week of Sept. 21, Livermore spokesman Nolan O’Brien wrote in an email. Livermore crews expect to make three shipments per week for at least the next four or five weeks, he said.
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board discussed the shipments in a staff report dated Sept. 4 and recently posted on the board’s webpage. The independent federal nuclear health and safety watchdog said it got its information on the Livermore shipments from an eight-week rolling schedule issued by DOE on Aug. 20.
None of the Livermore shipments have shown up yet on the Department of Energy’s online WIPP Waste Information System, but there is typically a lag time of about two weeks before shipments appear on the public site.
In October 2018, a Livermore National Laboratory spokesman said the DOE facility expected to resume shipments to WIPP in 2019 after not having shipped any transuranic waste there since around 2010. A quick scan of the public WIPP waste database on Monday, however, did not show any shipments from Livermore in 2019, or so far in 2020.
The impending Livermore shipments to WIPP were also mentioned Sept. 9 by James McConnell, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s administrator for safety, infrastructure and operations, during a presentation at the ExchangeMonitor’s virtual RadWaste Summit.
Developed as a competing nuclear-weapons design lab to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the early 1950s, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory continues to lead key nuclear weapons work for the National Nuclear Security Administration. The lab is the design agency for the upcoming W80-4 and W87-1 programs to refurbish air-launched cruise missile warheads and intercontinental ballistic missile warheads, respectively.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant reopened in early 2017 after a nearly three-year closure following an underground radiation leak in February 2014.
