Nuclear Waste Partnership President Phil Breidenbach is set to depart after two years of shepherding the company’s drive to reopen the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, and the Energy Department is sending him away with a final set of good marks in the contractor’s latest annual review.
Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) nabbed $11.3 million in award fees for fiscal 2016: good for 84 percent of the total amount available.
There were some swings and misses in that final scorecard, to be sure: NWP left $750,000 on the table because it did not downgrade Panel 7 — the area of WIPP contaminated by radiation in 2014 — to a “Contamination Area” from a “High Contamination Area,” according to the report.
DOE also dinged NWP for rising mine-safety citations from the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, which periodically inspects WIPP. There were 60 violations in 2016, and “[s]everal of the citations were repeat violations and a number of the 60 citations were of higher significance” than those issued in fiscal 2015, DOE wrote.
In addition, some WIPP miners complained to DOE’s local Carlsbad Field Office that NWP was not addressing their professional concerns about the site’s structural integrity, known in mining jargon as ground-control.
Nevertheless, DOE gave its contractor credit, and the fees that go with it, for one of the biggest news stories in the weapons complex last year: maintaining “the availability of the Waste Isolation Pilot (WIPP) at a high enough level and completed activities in fiscal year (FY)2016 to support recovery and readiness to resume transuranic (TRU) waste disposal operations in FY2017.”
That included plowing through almost 150 of the corrective actions prescribed by an Accident Investigation Board in the wake of the 2014 underground truck fire and radiation release that closed the mine, and generally improving WIPP’s safety culture.
Breidenbach is set to leave NWP on June 10, to be replaced by Bruce Covert: an executive with one of NWP’s parent companies, Los Angeles-based AECOM.
That would leave Covert holding the reins when it comes time for DOE to pick up, or not pick up, the first of two options on NWP’s Waste Isolation Pilot Project Management and Operating Contract. The first option is for a one-year period that would begin Oct. 1 after the end of what has been a tumultuous five-year base period.
The whole contract, including the five-year base, the one-year option coming due, and a second option that would carry the contract four more years through to its end date on Sept. 30, 2022, would be worth about $2 billion over 10 years.
DOE has not disclosed the value of the one-year option; when the agency awarded the contract in 2012, it contained only a single five-year option that was worth about $666 million.
Meanwhile, details about the shipments rolling into WIPP are starting to drizzle into the public sphere. So far — and with the caveat that the sample size is extremely small — the mine is off to the slow-and-steady start NWP and DOE forecast late last year when the facility officially reopened after the 2014 accidents.
Records maintained at the recently reactivated Waste Data System/WIPP Waste Information System show that, at least in the month of April, DOE is pacing about two shipments per week to WIPP.
The mine took delivery of three shipments from the Idaho National Laboratory and two from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina last month. That actually comes out to a little under two a week, but more shipments are said to have arrived at WIPP since the latest publicly acknowledged receipt; these reportedly include some transuranic waste from the Los Alamos National Laboratory that had been temporarily stored at a private facility in West Texas.
DOE does not officially acknowledge receipt of a shipment until two weeks after that waste is buried underground.
In the near term, at least, there are signs that WIPP will continue to enjoy support from Congress, even though the Trump administration’s feelings about the mine are not totally clear yet.
While the White House has not yet indicated its funding plans for WIPP — those will come in the fiscal 2018 budget request expected to drop May 22 — the 2017 spending bill signed last week included a threefold increase, to $30 million or so, for a new exhaust shaft: a critical part of the new ventilation system DOE and NWP plan at the mine. Restoring underground ventilation to pre-accident levels is essential to meeting WIPP’s long-term goal of interring 37,723 shipments by the 2034 end of the mine’s legally authorized life.
NWP and DOE are mulling extending the mine’s operational life for decades beyond that point. Planning for that extension is part of the company’s contract, and netted NWP $250,000 in fees in fiscal 2016 for “developing an overarching vision and strategy for WIPP to achieve its operational lifetime through FY 2050 with both near term and long term operational activities and projects.”
The contractor and local DOE officials in Carlsbad, N.M., had their opportunity to share those plans with new Energy Secretary Rick Perry week, when the former Texas governor visited the mine as part of his listening tour of DOE nuclear sites.
.@WIPPNews serves a vital national security role. The employees and contractors are proud professionals who help keep America safe. pic.twitter.com/e3tSnPvP8J
— Rick Perry (@SecretaryPerry) May 11, 2017
