PHOENIX— A maintenance outage at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., which started Jan. 26, concluded Monday, a site manager said Monday.
Shipments of defense-related transuranic waste to the underground salt mine should resume Friday, Tammy Hobbes, vice president of site prime contractor Salado Isolation Mining Contractors said on the sidelines of the Waste Management Symposia.
Final paperwork for the resumption of waste shipments is being wrapped up now, Hobbes told Exchange Monitor following participation in a Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) panel discussion.
WIPP usually has annual maintenance outages. More than 100 preventative maintenance tasks were carried out during the latest outage, Hobbes said. The outage was announced last year by Ken Harrawood, president of the Bechtel-led Salado Isolation Mining Contractors
WIPP received its first shipment of transuranic waste, from Los Alamos National Laboratory, 25 years ago this month, DOE officials said during Monday’s sessions.
WIPP is about 43% full, Harrawood said Monday, adding that the mine has already disposed of the transuranic waste from many big generators, like the long-closed Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado. Idaho National Laboratory is currently WIPP’s largest shipper and within a decade, the Hanford Site in Washington state will become a WIPP shipper, he added.
