ALEXIANDRIA, VA — The Department of Energy expects a new ventilation system at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico to come online between 2024 and 2026, the manager of the agency’s Carlsbad field office told Weapons Complex Monitor here this week.
The agency’s Office of Environmental Management expects its rebaselining of the cost and schedule for the Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System to be completed in early 2022, DOE’s Reinhard Knerr said Wednesday on the sidelines of the National Cleanup Workshop, sponsored by the Energy Communities Alliance.
Some things are difficult to gauge, such as the lingering impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, Knerr said. Currently, planners are trying to determine how the current vaccine mandate for federal contractors might affect the timetable for completion.
The new system, designed to reverse the ill effects of a nearly three-year shutdown that followed the underground equipment fire and radiation release of 2014, is designed to bring underground airflow at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) up to about 540,000 cubic feet per minute. That is roughly triple the current level and would allow resumption of simultaneous maintenance, salt mining and waste emplacement, DOE has said.
“We have really been limited in what we can do underground,” since February 2014, Sean Dunagan, president of WIPP prime Nuclear Waste Partnership, said at the Cleanup Workshop.
In April, Nuclear Waste Partnership hired a replacement subcontractor, Kiewit affiliate the Industrial Company, or TIC, to complete the ventilation project under a $163-million contract. That followed the termination of the original ventilation subcontractor, Critical Applications Alliance, which had a $135-million subcontract.
Critical Applications Alliance sued over the decision but eventually settled with Nuclear Waste Partnership, writing in legal filings that the initial slow progress on the new permanent ventilation system was due in part to the pandemic and communications problems with the prime.
Dunagan also said excavation is resuming on a new utility shaft at WIPP that should also help augment the Safety Significant Confined Ventilation System. The New Mexico Environment Department in October ruled in favor of WIPP management’s request to resume sinking the new utility shaft following an administrative hearing earlier this year.
