The Department of Energy and the prime for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico last month brought online the 700-C underground ventilation fan not used regularly since the 2014 accident that forced the disposal site out of service for about three years.
Reinhard Knerr, manager of DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office that oversees the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), and Sean Dunagan, president and project manager of Nuclear Waste Partnership, both acknowledged redeployment of the idle fan Monday in a video presentation for members of the New Mexico Legislature.
The fan was put into service Jan. 14, according to a WIPP spokesperson.
The agency and the contractor largely finished testing the fan in November. Restart could provide about 90,000 additional cubic feet per minute of underground airflow for non-waste-handling operations, bringing total airflow to about 240,000 cubic feet per minute. Completion of the Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System, long-delayed and now forecast for 2025 or so, will eventually bring the salt mine’s airflow to about 540,000 cubic feet a minute.
By mid-2022, emplacement of transuranic waste in Panel 7 should be finished and disposal in Panel 8 will begin, Dunagan said. The move out of Panel 7 is significant because it means workers will no longer be emplacing waste in the panel partly contaminated by the 2014 underground radiation accident, Dunagan said.
Regarding waste disposal, Knerr said WIPP missed its fiscal 2021 target of 250 shipments in part because management underestimated the workplace impact of the delta variant during the summer — a typically busy time for waste emplacement. WIPP disposed of 199 shipments during fiscal 2021, which ended Sept. 30.
During the 45-minute WIPP update, Knerr said DOE is in the process of procuring a successor prime contract for the current $2.7-billion agreement held since October 2012 by Nuclear Waste Partnership, an Amentum-BWX Technologies team. While the current management and operations pact is set to expire March 31, Knerr said the agency holds a six-month option that would keep the contractor around through September.
On another topic, the managers said a new utility shaft at WIPP should be 1,500-feet deep by year’s end. Work resumed on the shaft, which will eventually reach more than 2,200-feet deep, after a New Mexico Environment Department ruling in October allowed work there to resume. Since work restarted, a multi-level work platform has been installed at about 120 feet to aid in the development.
Officially known as the New Mexico Legislative Breakfast, this marked the second year the COVID pandemic forced the event online— no breakfast included.
WIPP Foregoing Winter Maintenance Outage For Substation Work
WIPP won’t launch its regular winter maintenance outage this month or next, deferring such work until fall, when an electrical substation was scheduled to be replaced.
The annual maintenance outage, together with replacement of the roughly 30-year old surface Substation 3 at WIPP, should last about 80 days, said Donavan Mager, spokesman for WIPP prime Nuclear Waste Partnership.
“The decision was made to do the outage in the fall to avoid interfering with current waste shipments since WIPP cannot receive and process waste while substation 3 is being replaced,” Mager said in an email late last week to Weapons Complex Monitor.
The new substation weighs about 46,000 pounds and arrived at WIPP in a special container earlier this month, according to a Twitter posting last week by DOE’s WIPP.
Substation 3 is nearing the end of its service life and needs to be updated, Mager said. Substations at WIPP reduce or “step down” the 13,800 volts provided by the utility into usable voltages for site equipment. The cost of the project is about $1.5 million. The construction does not require participation by electric utility Xcel Energy, the spokesman added.
Coming into 2021, the prime contractor was hoping to have the new substation installed by June 30, 2021, according to the contractor’s Performance Evaluation and Measurement Plan.
The new Substation 1 has been delivered to the WIPP site, but a replacement date has not been scheduled yet, the spokesperson said.
