Chris Schneidmiller
WC Monitor
1/15/2016
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 Monitor.
One revision eliminates the requirement to operate two monitoring systems for volatile organic compounds (VOC) such as the toxins carbon tetrachloride and methylene chloride that could be released during waste operations in WIPP’s underground storage space. Instead of keeping the systems in the mine, two are being installed above-ground at the facility.
In the September 2015 application for the Class 2 modification, the DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office highlighted the challenges of conducting monitoring in areas contaminated by radiological material released in a February 2014 accident, including ensuring protection for personnel who maintain and collect samples from the equipment. The office also noted 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 comments submitted last November on the modification proposal that the underground “contamination merits increased surface and underground monitoring, not the elimination of the underground monitoring.” Comments from the local community and other stakeholders looked more favorably on the proposal.
In its response to the organization’s comment, “NMED took the position that above ground monitoring is sufficient,” Don Hancock, SRIC nuclear waste program manager, said by email. “And while they didn’t directly respond to the fact that … the below ground monitoring has actually helped protect the underground workers, they said that now would be a [Mine Safety and Health Administration] responsibility – which, of course, MSHA says it’s not theirs.”
VOC monitoring is still required during waste emplacement operations in the mine’s disposal rooms, said Kathryn Roberts, director of the NMED Resource Protection Division. Specifically, that covers the active room and all filled rooms in the storage panel being filled with waste at any given time.
Separately, the revised permit also reduces the mandatory airflow in the underground from an average of 260,000 standard cubic feet per minute (CFM) to 35,000 standard CFM “in each active room when waste disposal is taking place and workers are present in the room.”
Airflow in the underground is down from roughly 425,000 CFM to 60,000 CFM since the February 2014 radiation release while WIPP shifted to “filtration mode” to prevent radiological contaminants from escaping into the environment. That prevents any waste operations. The Department of Energy is installing interim and supplemental ventilation systems that will boost airflow, and ultimately plans to put into place a new permanent system that would bring airflow capacity to pre-incident levels or above.
Before the permit modification request, the facility was required to sustain a running annual average mine ventilation rate of 260,000 CFM and a minimum 35,000 CFM to the storage room undergoing active waste emplacement. The running annual average was deleted from the permit “as it was used in a calculation of VOC emissions based on total mine ventilation flowrate and the flow through the disposal circuit,” NMED spokeswoman Allison Scott Majure said by email. The 35,000 CFM requirement for the active storage room remains. “NMED determined in this [permit modification request] that variability in total mine exhaust flowrate does not appreciably affect impact to human health and the environment,” Majure stated.
The permit update was formally requested by the Carlsbad Field Office and WIPP contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) but was the result of years of talks between those entities and the state, according to Flynn. Approval was one step in his department authorizing resumption of waste emplacement operations at WIPP, which DOE intends to achieve in 2016.
Flynn and Roberts noted a number of improvements that DOE and NWP have made in WIPP operations in the nearly two years since the radiation incident, including better training, establishing an emergency operations center, and setting procedures intended to prevent future incidents of this kind. But they said significant work remains before the state will allow WIPP to reopen, including further permit modifications and finalization of a settlement under which DOE would pay the state $73 million over the WIPP incident and waste management problems at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the point of origin for the container that caused the WIPP radiation release.
“We’ve seen a lot of positive steps forward toward our goal of getting the facility reopened. This is just the latest step forward,” Flynn said.
