The New Mexico Environment Department on Tuesday kicked off a 60-day comment period on a 10-year permit renewal for the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, with the state fighting the federal government’s attempt to keep the mine’s closure date open-ended.
The DOE has said it needs the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) to operate as late as the 2080s, especially to accommodate transuranic waste from plutonium pit production at the Los Alamos Site in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
The DOE and its prime contractor proposed “removal of defined closure dates” from the permit to allow the deep-underground salt mine to operate until it is filled with its maximum legal limit of defense-related transuranic waste, according to a 14-page summary of the draft permit.
The state, however, seeks to force DOE and its contractor, which are the joint permittees, to “make a case for permit renewal at the end of the permit term,” according to the summary.
Members of the public may comment on the draft permit until Feb. 18. The comment period opened Tuesday, after the state Environment Department determined “technical completeness” for the hazardous waste facility permit renewal application filed by DOE and current contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership on March 31, 2020.
A public comment portal on the WIPP permit renewal can be used to request a public hearing. The New Mexico Environment Department will provide a 30-day notice of any hearing.
WIPP is DOE’s only permanent, deep-underground repository for defense-related transuranic waste: material and equipment contaminated in the course of nuclear-weapons production by elements heavier than uranium, typically plutonium.
With DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration a few years away from beginning its plutonium pit mission at Los Alamos and Savannah River, and the existing logjam of transuranic waste piled up at shuttered nuclear weapons sites being cleaned up by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, DOE needs WIPP more than ever.
But New Mexico, which wants stricter rules for legacy waste cleanup at Los Alamos and has proven unwilling to concede to open-ended WIPP operations, is driving a hard bargain for permit renewal.
Aside from insisting on a firm closure date, the state also wants the WIPP permit holders to make an “accurate inventory of waste awaiting clean-up around the United States, including [at] Los Alamos National Laboratory, for emplacement at WIPP.”
The state also wants to retain WIPP’s designation as a “pilot” plan for the permanent disposal of transuranic radioactive waste, according to the summary. The new draft includes information about planned waste-disposal panels at WIPP and tougher language intended to keep “incompatible” materials, those that might cause fires or explosions, out of the mine.
A drum from Los Alamos overheated and ruptured in February 2014, resulting in a radiation leak in the salt mine that effectively halted WIPP waste disposal for about three years.
