The New Mexico Environment Department on Jan. 8 signed off on revisions to monitoring of potentially dangerous materials and underground airflow levels at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
The modifications to WIPP’s state hazardous waste facility permit are intended to increase the safety of workers at the transuranic waste storage site near Carlsbad, New Mexico Environment Secretary Ryan Flynn told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
One revision eliminates the requirement for two volatile organic compound (VOC) monitoring systems in the underground storage space in favor or two systems above-ground at WIPP. In the application for the modification, the DOE Carlsbad Field Office highlighted the challenges of conducting monitoring in areas contaminated by radiological material released in a February 2014 accident, along with simplified air sampling methods and other technological improvements that aid above-ground monitoring.
“In a nutshell, we felt that the former VOC monitoring procedure needed to be improved in order to better protect surface workers. That’s’ really at the heart of this modification request,” Flynn said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “We believe that the new process that’s been put in place is actually more protective.”
The nongovernmental Southwest Research and Information Center, though, argued in submitted comments on the modification that the underground “contamination merits increased surface and underground monitoring, not the elimination of the underground monitoring.”
Separately, the revised permit also reduces the mandatory airflow in the underground from an average of 260,000 cubic feet per minute to 35,000 standard cubic feet per minute “in each active room when waste disposal is taking place and workers are present in the room.”
