Thursday passed without any word from the Department of Energy or its contractor on whether a major milestone in the resumption of transuranic waste storage at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Calrsbad, N.M., happened as scheduled.
According to the the 12-month WIPP Integrated Baseline developed by DOE and WIPP prime Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP), workers were slated on Thursday to finish their operational readiness review: a milestone in which the contractor would officially inform the department it is ready to resume operation of the nation’s only disposal facility for the radio-contaminated material and equipment known as transuranic waste. WIPP has been closed to waste shipments since two accidents in February 2014.
With the WIPP restart already two months behind schedule, and with only about that many days worth of schedule margin padded into the WIPP Integrated Baseline that serves as the only public schedule to track progress on the restart, it is becoming less clear by the day whether the facility will indeed reopen its doors as planned on Dec. 12.
A Nuclear Waste Partnership spokesperson did not reply to several requests for comment this week by Weapons Complex Monitor’s Friday deadline. Similarly, NWP and DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office have not responded to phone calls and emails dating to June 20 regarding exactly how much wiggle room remains in the 12-month WIPP Integrated Baseline.
The NWP contractor readiness review was scheduled to start on June 16, according to the public schedule in the WIPP Integrated Baseline; it is not clear it did. It took two months longer than expected to approve a critical safety document that was a major bottleneck for the remaining WIPP restart activities, but DOE and its contractors maintain waste emplacement will resume by Dec. 12.
That is despite the fact that the rightward slip of that critical document — the documented safety analysis (DSA) — precipitated delays for another crucial WIPP restart activity, integrated cold runs: an eight-week program of waste-emplacement dress rehearsals in which Nuclear Waste Partnership practices the tighter new disposal procedures in the DSA using waste containers packed with non-nuclear materials. They were intended to begin on Feb. 22 and be completed on May 5.
Assuming DOE and its contractor work the equivalent of seven days a week at the site, integrated cold runs that began June 1 and lasted eight weeks would wrap up July 27. During a June 1 WIPP town hall meeting webcast from Carlsbad, Jim Blankenhorn, Nuclear Waste Partnership’s WIPP recovery manager, said the contractor readiness review would not begin until after integrated cold runs ended.
The WIPP Integrated Baseline includes 72 days, counting weekends and holidays, of what DOE and its contractor call “schedule uncertainty buffer.” Again counting weekends and holidays, the documented safety analysis — which was approved May 29 — was delivered 100 days after the deadline set in the WIPP Integrated Baseline.
