New Mexico will hold hearings soon about restarting excavation of a new utility shaft at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, the Department of Energy’s manager for the transuranic waste disposal site told state lawmakers in a virtual briefing Tuesday.
In addition, the facility should emplace more shipments of transuranic waste in the next 12 months as it starts to bounce back from the COVID-19 pandemic, Reinhard Knerr, the DOE’s manager of the Carlsbad Field Office that oversees the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), said during an annual briefing for the New Mexico legislature.
The briefing, held via video conference because of the ongoing pandemic, also featured Nuclear Waste Partnership president and project manager Sean Dunagan.
New Mexico in October refused to renew a 120-day temporary authorization to continue work on the underground shaft, citing COVID-19 infections in southern New Mexico and at WIPP, Knerr said.
The multipurpose shaft would provide an alternate entry to the salt mine and enhance the planned Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System, an airflow project that is being re-baselined after Nuclear Waste Partnership terminated a subcontractor agreement in August.
On a different topic, Knerr said that WIPP will start to receive shipments of transuranic waste from Waste Control Specialists in Andrews County, Texas soon.
The waste was rerouted to Texas in 2014 as a result of the February 2014 underground radiation leak at WIPP that effectively closed the mine for about three years. There could be up to 25 shipments from Waste Control Specialists over the coming 12 months, the Carlsbad field office manager said. The waste was potentially ignitable and Texas officials have been pushing DOE to remove it from the commercially operated facility in Andrews.
In addition, Knerr said that WIPP has a planned two-month maintenance outage scheduled to start in about a week.
After disposing of only 192 shipments of transuranic waste during 2020, DOE expects WIPP will receive many more over the next 12 months as the pandemic gradually subsides.
WIPP could receive up to 325 shipments of transuranic waste for disposal between Feb. 1 of this year, and Jan. 31 of 2022, according to slides from the presentation.
Just over half of the total, 165, could come from the Idaho National Laboratory, according to the figures provided to the state lawmakers for planning purposes. The other top shippers are likely to be the Los Alamos National Laboratory (80) in New Mexico and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee (28).
During the presentation, Dunagan said the COVID-19 pandemic has affected nearly all aspects of work at the site. Just in the past week, a crew of workers needed to be quarantined after one member tested positive for the virus, and a replacement crew was called in, Dunagan said.
So far during the 2021 fiscal year, which started Oct. 1, 2020, there have been 70 shipments received at WIPP, Dunagan said.
In addition, 153,000 tons of salt were mined during 2020. Despite the pandemic salt mining has enabled workers to complete the “rough cut” for Panel 8, Dunagan said. The panel should be certified for waste emplacement by January 2022, he added.
WIPP continues to enjoy increased federal funding, going to about $420 million in fiscal 2021 from $407 million in fiscal 2020 and $403 million in fiscal 2019, Knerr, said.
Parties Await N.M. Appeals Court Decision on WIPP Waste Volume Reporting
In other WIPP news, the New Mexico Court of Appeals has been briefed on a lawsuit brought by citizen groups challenging modifications made in December 2018 by DOE to the method used to calculate waste volumes placed underground, one of the parties said by email Feb. 7.
The case is now briefed and the appeals court judges “will issue an opinion when they do,” Don Hancock, director of the nuclear waste safety program at Southwest Research and Information Center said.
Southwest Research and Nuclear Waste New Mexico filed suit in January 2019 over a permit modification the New Mexico Environment Department granted DOE in December 2018 that let the feds change the way they calculate underground transuranic waste volumes at WIPP.
The change allowed WIPP to count only the volume of transuranic waste in disposal containers, without including the volume of the container itself as previously required.
Changing the volume calculation, and doing it retroactively, effectively meant WIPP went from being roughly half-full to only about one-third full. The current legal maximum is 176,000 cubic meters of defense-related transuranic waste, as allowed by the federal Land Withdrawal Act that effectively chartered the mine.
The DOE has tallied waste volumes both with and without container volumes while the case is on appeal in the state court. The case initially started in mediation at the appeals court, but shifted to normal litigation when the sides were unable to bridge their differences.
