New Mexico’s governor blasted the Secretary of Energy this month for failing to provide “meaningful and transparent public engagement” about the agency’s plans to ship immobilized, surplus plutonium to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant from South Carolina.
“Because the issues raised in the petition can only be addressed by DOE, I am passing this petition along to you,” Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) wrote in the April 8 letter to fellow democrat and former Michigan mayor Jennifer Granholm.
“The Department of Energy has received Governor Lujan Grisham’s letter,” a DOE spokesperson wrote in an email Wednesday. “DOE values its ongoing relationship with the State of New Mexico. We take seriously our efforts to communicate and involve stakeholders as we conduct key environmental and national security missions in New Mexico.”
The spokesperson declined to say whether Granholm or a designee of hers at DOE or its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) had replied to Lujan Grisham’s letter.
Lujan Grisham mailed her letter after more than 1,000 New Mexicans signed a petition opposing the NNSA’s long-established plans to ship portions of a 34 metric ton tranche of surplus weapon-usable plutonium to the Waste Isolation Pilot as part of the agency’s Surplus Plutonium Disposition program. The plutonium will be diluted at Los Alamos, shipped to Savannah River for immobilization and then shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) for final disposal.
Federal law limits the amount of waste DOE may send to WIPP, which the agency’s Office of Environmental Management operates. WIPP is the country’s only deep underground nuclear-waste repository and is legally allowed to take on a little more than 175,000 cubic meters, or more than 6.2 million cubic feet, of transuranic waste — equipment and material contaminated by elements heavier than uranium, typically plutonium.
In 2018, the Department of Energy changed the way it calculates the volumes of waste stored at WIPP by ceasing to tabulate the volume of waste containers as part of the official disposal volume.
That freed up space in the underground salt mine, where according to agency projections, plutonium from the the Surplus Plutonium Disposition project will take up only some 2,000 cubic meters of space: only 6% of the volume DOE would have had to reserve underground if it had to count the containers used to hold this immobilized plutonium.
Even so, DOE data presented to the National Academies of Sciences show that there is not enough room in WIPP, under the current legal limits, for all the transuranic waste DOE had notionally ticketed for a one-way trip to the mine.
The @theNASEM‘s Committee on Disposal of Surplus Plutonium at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant has good graphic in their report on the @NNSANews Surplus Plutonium Disposition (dilute and dispose) plan.
Not new information, but a new presentation. pic.twitter.com/iMo0GAxRf2
— Dan Leone (@Leone_EXM) April 30, 2020
According to those data, unless Congress changes WIPP’s waste cap or DOE comes up with another way to dispose of transuranic waste, WIPP will not be able to hold both the many tons of transuranic waste stored at shuttered nuclear weapon sites across the country and an almost equally large tranche of transuranic waste the NNSA will create when it starts making plutonium pits — fissile nuclear weapon cores — at the Los Alamos National Laboratory later this decade and at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina sometime next decade.
So far, New Mexico has opposed such changes at the state and federal level. Under Lujan Grisham’s administration, New Mexico has taken a hard stance about nuclear waste cleanup in New Mexico, where WIPP and two major nuclear weapons laboratories, Los Alamos and Sandia, are major employers.
In 2020, Lujan Grisham also pressured DOE to explain how the Surplus Plutonium Disposition program will comply with WIPP’s existing waste acceptance criteria. The governor has also asked a federal court to walk back a 2016 consent order, worked out between her predecessor Susana Martinez (R) and DOE, that governs legacy weapons cleanup at Los Alamos.
