SUMMERLIN, NEV. — The Department of Energy should have a new 10-year authorization to continue operating the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico in place before 2024, the manager of the agency’s Carlsbad Field Office said Wednesday.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant’s (WIPP) current 10-year state license expired months ago and DOE will operate under the old one until the New Mexico Environment Department acts upon a new one in early 2023, Reinhard Knerr, manager of DOE’s Carlsbad office that oversees WIPP, said in a remote presentation to the Radwaste Summit hosted here by ExchangeMonitor Publications.
WIPP critics often say the disposal site is supposed to start shutting down in 2024, but that is not a “regulatorily enforceable” deadline, Knerr said. When WIPP started up in 1999 the 25-year point, or 2024 was listed as the time when transuranic waste disposal might start winding down, but it is not a shutdown deadline, Knerr said in response to a question from Weapons Complex Monitor.
A clause in the state license says: “The Disposal Phase may therefore extend until 2024, and the latest expected year of final closure of the WIPP facilityWaste Isolation Pilot Plant Hazardous Waste Permit March 2018(i.e., date of final closure certification) would be 2034.”
The text is “descriptive language as part of the schedule for final facility closure and is not a Permit condition,” a spokesperson for the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) said in a Thursday email. “NMED expects this issue to be addressed as part of the renewal process.”
Organizations such as Nuclear Watch New Mexico and Southwest Research and Information Center have said DOE is trying to foster a “Forever WIPP” with no end in sight.
Meanwhile, WIPP should start emplacing waste in the recently excavated Panel 8 around 2022 and plans to complete construction of a new underground ventilation system in 2025 that should prepare the facility for increased shipments over time.
With the semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) planning to ramp up to production of plutonium pits at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to 30 a year by fiscal year 2026, the lab could generate up to 2,000 drums of transuranic waste annually, NNSA’s associate administrator for enterprise stewardship, Ahmad Al-Daouk, said in his presentation. As a result, Los Alamos would likely seek to increase its WIPP shipments to three per week rather than two, he added.
Overall, WIPP received fewer than 200 shipments from all generator sites in fiscal 2021, which ended Sept. 30, Knerr said. Online records show WIPP received 199 shipments during the period. That amounts to only five shipments per “shippable week,” which is not too bad “considering COVID,” Knerr said.
The DOE plans to ramp up to 10 shipments per week of operation in coming months, Knerr said. The DOE said in its 2022 budget justification that opening of Panel 8 for disposal in the summer of 2022 could enable WIPP to take in 14 shipments per week.
WIPP does not accept waste several weeks annually due to an maintenance outage that often lasts three or more weeks; weather-related outages and various state, federal and tribal holidays periods, the agency has said. If DOE and prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership average 10 shipments per week and has 45 shippable weeks, the total would amount to be in the neighborhood of 450, or the highest total since the underground facility resumed disposal in 2017 after being offline three years following an underground radiation leak in February 2014.
The best year since the reopening was 311 in 2018. The agency expects construction of the new Safety Significant Confined Ventilation System, which should provide enough underground airflow to allow simultaneous, waste emplacement, salt mining and maintenance, in 2025, Knerr said. As a result, DOE could replicate pre-2014 shipping rates of more than 700 annually.
