This week, as the Energy Department weighed decisions that will determine if the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) reopens in 2016, news broke that New Mexico’s U.S. senators believe the facility needs tens of millions of dollars more than expected to safely resume nuclear waste disposal.
After numerous setbacks this year, DOE and site contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) are in the home stretch of a crunch-time push to reopen WIPP this month. That would end a nearly three-year moratorium on waste disposal that followed 2014’s accidental underground radiation release and earlier, unrelated, underground fire.
But on Thursday, a day before DOE was set to issue an internal report outlining any remaining fixes NWP must make before reopening the mine, Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Tom Udall (D-N.M.) told senior lawmakers on Capitol Hill that WIPP needs more money this year than either the White House or Congress was prepared to spend.
“The original [Fiscal Year] 2017 budget request of $271 million for WIPP does not reflect the additional funding required to restore safe operations,” the lawmakers wrote to the leaders of the Senate Appropriations Committee in a letter dated Nov. 16. “WIPP’s total required funding level for FY17 is now estimated to be $325.5 million.”
The White House released its budget request for DOE and the rest of the federal government in February. WIPP expenses discovered since then — and arguably before then, as federal agencies typically start budget negotiations with the White House in November — would not have been part of that request.
That point is effectively moot, however, because the federal government has been funded since Oct. 1 not at the White House’s requested level, but under a continuing resolution that froze federal spending at fiscal 2016 levels. The continuing resolution expires on Dec. 9, but another short-term spending plan through the end of March appears likely.
WIPP got more funding in fiscal 2016 than either the White House requested or Congress was prepared to appropriate for 2017, but even annualized 2016 levels of $300 million or so are about $25 million short of what Heinrich and Udall say WIPP needs.
Kristen Ellis, acting communications director for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management in Washington, did not reply to a request for comment about WIPP’s 2017 budget needs.
In their letter to the Senate budget leads, Heinrich and Udall said WIPP needed $26.8 million to pay for New Mexico infrastructure improvements DOE agreed to fund in January as part of a settlement over the 2014 radiation release. The 2016 funding level would cover that alone, leaving a $25 million shortfall.
The settlement money was not controversial in Congress this summer, when both chambers drafted 2017 budget bills that included the funding.
New WIPP expenses outside the settlement, the senators wrote, are due to “unanticipated matters related to restarting operations, continuing issues with ground control … mining in panel 8 and addressing a backlog of equipment maintenance, repair and upgrades at WIPP.”
The senators’ letter first surfaced publicly in a Thursday report by the local Carlsbad Current-Argus. Also Thursday, DOE confirmed what Weapons Complex Morning Briefing reported Wednesday: the agency planned this week to finish an internal report summarizing the two-week agency operational readiness review just completed at WIPP.
“Restart of waste emplacement operations will be determined by the outcome of the team’s review,” reads a note posted late Thursday on DOE’s WIPP website.
In the DOE-led review, agency experts from outside the Carlsbad Field Office that manages WIPP examined whether NWP is ready to resume underground waste disposal.
People familiar with the review said DOE was scheduled to conduct its exit interview with NWP early Friday afternoon, local time. The interview would cap just over two weeks of WIPP’s final exam with the agency, in which officials assessed whether NWP is ready to begin waste emplacement under the strict new operating procedures the AECOM-led company created this year to prevent a repeat of the 2014 underground accidents.
The department is expected to provide a public update about the review Dec. 8 during a WIPP town hall to be webcast from Carlsbad. The agency might prescribe some corrective actions — punch-list items in a best-case scenario, long-term repairs in a worst-case scenario — for NWP before giving the nod to reopen WIPP.
DOE does not have final say on when WIPP reopens. That authority belongs to the New Mexico Environment Department: the mine’s primary regulator. New Mexico Environment Secretary Butch Tongate has remained somewhat aloof about the reopening, neither committing to a timetable for beginning the state review nor offering comment on the DOE operational readiness review.
Once WIPP reopens, NWP’s first task will be interring waste that has been marooned above ground at the mine since the underground radiation release and earlier, unrelated underground fire in 2014. It will take two or three months before WIPP accepts any new shipments of transuranic waste from across the DOE complex, Carlsbad Field Office Manager Todd Shrader said earlier this fall.
