The New Mexico Court of Appeals has been briefed on a lawsuit brought by citizen groups challenging modifications made in December 2018 by the Department of Energy to the method used to calculate waste volumes at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, one of the parties said by email Sunday.
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 the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (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.
