The New Mexico Environment Department plans consider the Department of Energy’s plan to sink a new utility shaft at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in a Zoom hearing on May 17, an environmental activist told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
The first day of the hearing will run from 12 noon through 4 p.m. Mountain Time before taking a break and resuming at 6 p.m., Don Hancock, director of the nuclear waste safety program at Southwest Research and Information Center, said in a Monday email citing a notice from the New Mexico Environment Department.
The hearing will continue on subsequent days under the same schedule until it is complete, Hancock said.
In November, Stephanie Stringer, the resource protection director for the New Mexico Environment Department, refused to extend a six-month temporary work authorization that expired in October. Stringer cited 20 positive COVID-19 tests during the first full week in November as one reason for not re-upping the temporary work order.
Resumption of work on the utility shaft is considered a 2021 priority at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., and work on the permit modification request for shaft No. 5, as it is also known, is going forward, the manager of DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, Reinhard Knerr said in an online briefing for New Mexico lawmakers last week.
Harrison Western-Shaft Sinkers is to drill the shaft under a $75-million contract awarded in August 2019 by the Amentum-led WIPP prime Nuclear Waste Partnership. Project completion is targeted for 2022. When finished, the final shaft will measure 26 feet in diameter and extend to 2,275 feet below the surface. The contract also calls for mining two access drifts, or tunnels, which will connect the shaft with the existing WIPP underground, the prime contractor said when announcing the contract award.
In addition to providing an alternate entryway underground, the shaft will work in tandem with the planned Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System, Knerr said during his presentation last week. That major ventilation project, crucial to restoring WIPP disposal throughput to normal levels while simultaneously allowing the prime to mine out new storage space, is being re-baselined after the Nuclear Waste Partnership terminated a subcontractor agreement in August 2020.
Article modified Feb. 17 to correct the date in the first paragraph.
