The Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site is this week sending its eighth shipment of transuranic (TRU) waste in this fiscal year to the reopened Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. The shipment meets the projection managers at the South Carolina facility set forth earlier this year.
Two shipments apiece were sent to WIPP in April, May, and June, and one shipment was sent in July, SRS spokesman Monte Volk said by email. The site’s TRU waste consists of clothing, tools, rags, residues, debris, and other items contaminated with trace amounts of plutonium during past and present operations at the nuclear weapons site. Volk said the amount of waste in each shipment varies “because the waste is not all of uniform size.”
WIPP reopened last December after a nearly three-year shutdown caused by two unrelated safety incidents in February 2014: a salt haul truck fire on Feb. 5 and the release of a small amount of radiation on Feb. 14. Waste shipments from the Savannah River Site and other facilities resumed in April of this year.
SRS housed more than 15,000 cubic meters of transuranic waste when shipments to WIPP began in 2001. Volk said the site now houses less than 600 cubic meters of the material.
In an SRS update last week, the site reported that it is working with WIPP to certify additional shipments in fiscal 2018, which begins Oct. 1.
Through July 14, WIPP had received 35 waste shipments since reopening.
