Moniz: WIPP on Track for 2016 Reopening

About two months after the Energy Department announced the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant could not be recovered before the previously planned date of March 2016, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz yesterday said that the facility is still on track to reopen by Dec. 31, 2016. “This has been a terribly costly situation to all of us, across the complex, because of the ripple effects of WIPP’s closure,” he said during an address at DOE’s first National Cleanup Workshop, in Arlington, Va. “We will not lose focus on the safety. In terms of our recovery, we’ve had some glitches, but we are on track for a 2016 startup of operations.” Moniz said WIPP’s reopening would help pave the way for the facility to accept scheduled shipments of transuranic waste currently stored at DOE sites across the country. The department has not determined a numbered order for shipments after WIPP resumes operations. “We expect that we’ll be going through that exercise in the coming year,” Frank Marcinowski, acting associate principal deputy assistant secretary for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, said at the workshop. “But right now, it would be premature to do that.”