The Energy Department and contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership have now buried most of the radioactive waste that was stranded above ground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant three years ago, clearing out much-needed storage space for waste shipments slated to arrive from other DOE sites next month.
Since the department and its WIPP prime resumed waste disposal at the New Mexico facility on Jan. 4, “[w]e’ve emplaced right around 200 of the containers that were in the Waste Handling Building,” Todd Shrader, manager of DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, said Thursday at the latest the WIPP town hall meeting in Carlsbad. “We’ve got about 40 or so left and we expect that in the next few weeks, [a] relatively short time frame, we should get the rest of the emplacements done.”
The above-ground Waste Handling Building sits on top of WIPP and is the final stop for shipments of transuranic waste from across the DOE complex before they are placed underground.
Most of the transuranic waste sent to WIPP is classified as contact-handled: safe enough for properly protected human beings to touch. The Waste Handling Building has a maximum storage capacity for contact-handled waste of just over 135 cubic meters: not quite one-fifth of an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
About a third of that volume counts as emergency “surge storage” space, according to the WIPP operating permit granted to DOE and NWP by the New Mexico Environment Department. That means the permittees may only use the extra space when they cannot bury waste. Such was the case over the last three years or so, after the underground radiation release and unrelated underground truck-fire that shut WIPP down until late last year.
As a conditioning of reopening WIPP, New Mexico told DOE and NWP they can only use surge storage space in the Waste Handling Building through June 30.
Some of the containers now in the Waste Handling Building still cannot go underground because they contain oxidizing chemicals that are potential fire-starters, Shrader said last week at the annual Waste Management Symposium in Phoenix. Oxidizing chemicals are not permitted in WIPP, according to the strict new waste acceptance criteria the agency approved last year. A waste barrel containing such chemicals was blamed for the 2014 underground radiation leak.
DOE and NWP are working on a way to get the offending waste in the Waste Handling Building cleared for disposal in the next several months, J.R. Stroble, manager of DOE’s National TRU Waste Program, said at the symposium.
Even with the space taken up on-site by currently un-buriable containers with oxidizing chemicals, DOE and NWP believe they can begin accepting new shipments of transuranic waste from across the agency’s nuclear complex next month, Shrader said Thursday. DOE and NWP expect about 130 containers of transuranic waste to WIPP from April to January, at a rate of two to three shipments a week. The first shipments will come from one of three sites: privately operated Waste Control Specialists in Andrews, Texas; DOE’s Idaho Site; and the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C.
Shipments from the Oak Ridge Site near Oak Ridge, Tenn., and the Los Alamos National Laboratory near Los Alamos, N.M., will follow. DOE has yet to certify those two facilities are ready to ship their transuranic waste, Andy Walker, transportation logistics manager at the Carlsbad Field Office, said at the town hall.
Walker also told the in-person and online audience that DOE is close to awarding a five-year contract for transuranic waste transportation services to WIPP. The contract transition is set to begin in May, Walker said, teeing up an award some time before then.
Two expiring WIPP waste-hauling contracts were worth about $20 million over five years. They were worth substantially more at the time of their award in 2012, but DOE drastically scaled by orders on htese contracts after WIPP closed. DOE decided to award only a single follow-on contract because projected WIPP shipping rates over the next five years will be too low to justify two contracts, Walker said Thursday.
A staffer for U.S. Senator Tom Udall (D-N.M.) at Thursday’s meeting urged DOE to choose a New Mexico-based company to haul waste to WIPP. Beverly Allen-Ananins said her boss wanted to “encourage” DOE to pick a New Mexico company for the five-year WIPP Transportation Services Acquisition contract. DOE requested proposals in July. The deadline to bid was August.
Allen-Ananins asked who had bid on the contract, but Walker replied he could not identify bidders due to “the sensitivity of the acquisition process,” which was ongoing as of Thursday.
“Maybe our D.C. office can help with that process and find out, because we sure would like to promote that, like we did five years ago for that company to be a New Mexican company,” Allen-Ananins told Walker.
In 2012, DOE awarded five-year WIPP waste-hauling contracts to trucking companies CAST Specialty Transportation, of Denver, and Visionary Solutions, of Knoxville, Tenn.
A spokesperson for Udall’s office told Weapons Complex Monitor “Senator Udall is definitely interested in how New Mexico companies can better position themselves to be competitive for contracts and subcontracts.”
