With the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico undergoing its regular annual maintenance outage, there were only three shipments of transuranic waste to the underground salt mine during February.
Two of the three shipments to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) during the month came from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The other was transported from Waste Control Specialists’ site in Andrews County, Texas and is one of the shipments re-routed to that commercial site from Los Alamos in 2014, when an underground radiation release at WIPP put the mine out of service for about three years.
The data comes from the DOE’s public website on WIPP shipments.
There could be up to 25 shipments from Waste Control Specialists over the coming year, Reinhard Knerr, the DOE’s manager of the Carlsbad Field Office that oversees WIPP told a virtual briefing of the New Mexico legislature last month.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has been pushing DOE to remove all the potentially ignitable waste from the Waste Control Specialists site.
After disposing of only 192 shipments of waste during 2020, DOE officials expect to take in over 300 shipments during 2021 as the COVID-19 pandemic subsides.
But with the maintenance schedule expected to last until mid-April, no shipments are expected until then. WIPP is not expected to reach its 2013 throughput of more than 700 shipments until a new underground ventilation system is constructed. The cost and schedule of that project is being recalculated after prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership in August fired the subcontractor previously responsible for the new ventilation system.
