At some point in the future, the Energy Department would have to crank shipments of radioactively contaminated material to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) into overdrive to meet an internal projection of roughly 20 shipments a week over the mine’s 35-year operational life.
In the 35 years running through 2034, DOE thinks the New Mexico storage facility will receive 37,723 shipments of transuranic waste, or an average of just over 20 shipments each week, according to the agency’s latest estimate.
That estimate is two decades old, though DOE has cited it as recently as December in the Supplement Analysis for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Site-Wide Operations the agency published as a precursor to reopening the mine after its well-publicized three-year hiatus. The estimate comes from a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement DOE published in 1997.
To hit 20 shipments a week, DOE and WIPP prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) will have to substantially ramp up the site’s throughput above the past peak shipment rate of 17 a week in the short-sample-size 2014, during which the mine operated for fewer than two months before a radiation leak and unrelated fire shut it down.
Waste shipments to WIPP from off-site are set to resume in April at a rate of only five a week through at least January 2018, DOE and NWP announced on Feb. 14, the anniversary of the radiation leak. The agency has not said which site will go first, though the Idaho Site has the largest backlog of transuranic waste of any facility in the complex.
DOE hit an average WIPP weekly shipment rate of 15 a week in 2013, the last full year in which the mine operated as intended. In December’s supplemental analysis, the agency acknowledged “[s]hipping rates for the next five years have not been formally established. However, the shipping rates will be lower than the 2013 shipping rate.”
DOE did not immediately reply to a request for comment Wednesday.
