Carlsbad, N.M., is open for nuclear business, John Heaton said proudly last week.
There are a few irons in the fire — the city is all in favor of the consolidated interim nuclear waste-storage facility Holtec International wants to build outside town — but Carlsbad’s crown jewel is, of course, the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
“Great project,” Heaton said Friday of WIPP, which is practically the only thing anybody calls the transuranic waste disposal facility some 25 miles east of Carlsbad (the facility Holtec plans would be about 12 miles by road from WIPP).
WIPP remains for the moment the nation’s only deep-underground repository for radioactive waste of any kind. It has also been closed to waste shipments for nearly three years, to Heaton’s continuing consternation. This is a top problem for the former state lawmaker in his role as chairman of the Carlsbad Mayor’s Nuclear Task Force and co-chairman of the Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance.
WIPP prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership and DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office are pressing with a full head of steam to make the December restart date they targeted earlier this year, but customer and contractor now both admit they will be challenged to reopen the mine’s doors then and finally put the February 2014 accidental underground fire and unrelated radiation release behind them.
A glance at the WIPP reopening schedule published in January, along with some math-for-English-majors calculations, reveals DOE and its contractor are about a month behind schedule.
That math roughly jibes with what Heaton sees and hears around town. He is frustrated, to be sure, that WIPP’s grand reopening is running behind schedule (more so if you consider the March 2016 reopening date forecast around this time last year), but not so frustrated as to forget Carlsbad’s common cause with DOE and its contractor: to reopen the mine as soon as it it is safe to do so.
The WIPP reopening will be in focus at the 2016 ExchangeMonitor RadWaste Summit this week in Summerlin, Nev., with Carlsbad Field Office Manager Todd Shrader and Nuclear Waste Partnership Recovery Manager and Deputy Project Manager Jim Blankenhorn presenting during one panel discussion.
During a long drive through the desert last week, Heaton spoke over the phone with the ExchangeMonitor.
What is Carlsbad’s No. 1 priority at WIPP in 2017?
Well, we need to see it open! In the very early part of the year or the end of this year. At this point, I believe that they should be open if it’s not December, in January. And the thing I want to see is then get the waste that’s presently being stored [above-ground] at WIPP underground and disposed of, and I want to see shipments begin to come to WIPP. And that’s the No. 1 goal. Then we can figure out how to increase those shipments.
One of the bigger, and more expensive, engineering projects that needs to be done to get WIPP back into pre-accident shape is cranking the air-circulation back up to a level where it’s possible to do mine-expansion and waste-disposal at the same time.
We want to see them get through the critical decision-making about the new exhaust shaft, and get all the engineering and design completed by some time in the August 2017 time frame and get on with the construction of that shaft and the drift out to it so that they can begin to mine. And once they close the south end of the mine, they can seal it off and begin to work in fresh air again. That’s what we would like to see happen so they can get back up to speed again and operate at the level that they were operating before the accident. And I hope Congress hears this message, too.
What’s happening right now at WIPP?
Nuclear Waste Partnership was doing their own evaluation of the cold operations that finished in August, and local DOE management brought in some other DOE people to come in and observe the cold operations review. There were some deficiencies from cold ops NWP will now be correcting, and getting those deficiencies up to speed, ferreting out specific areas they can improve upon. I don’t know how long it will take.
What do things look like at WIPP right now?
You just have know there are regulators in their continuously now. There have been for six months, whether it’s mining regulators or nuclear. And the consequence is they’re getting all that supervision from the regulators and that has heightened management’s awareness of what they need to be doing.
Are there any areas in which you think Nuclear Waste Partnership could improve?
We’re still very unhappy that [major subcontractor] AREVA is part of that team [along with primes AECOM and BWX Technologies]. AREVA was deliberately trying to denigrate WIPP. They hired a company to put out junk science to denigrate WIPP, and WIPP’s potential to save the country $30 billion and, it was totally dishonest on their part, and it makes us unhappy that they’re one of the management teams. I don’t think they can ever overcome that unhappiness that we have for what they did, in my mind, that was so dishonest.
So would it be fair to say Carlsbad favors DOE’s preferred strategy of downblending some of the weapon-grade plutonium now stored at the Savannah River Site and storing it at WIPP, rather than using the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility AREVA is building at SRS to convert that material into commercial fuel?
Yes.
