The start of a crucial contractor review required to reopen the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) to nuclear waste shipments from across the country was overshadowed this week by the second partial ceiling collapse discovered in a seven-day stretch at the deep underground salt mine near Carlsbad, N.M.
So far, the Energy Department says the two cave-ins — discovered Sept. 27 and Oct. 4 — will not affect plans to reopen the mine by December or January. Assuming WIPP does restart operations then, the department would resume shipping transuranic waste to the mine around April, according to timetables made public this summer by DOE and contractor officials.
The two recent rock falls happened in the mine’s southern end, access to which has been restricted since 2014 after an accidental underground radiation release and earlier, unrelated, underground fire that have kept the facility shuttered for more than two years. Because of the access restrictions in WIPP’s southern end, DOE and site prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) have done less structural reinforcement in that part of the mine in recent years.
DOE and Nuclear Waste Partnership operate the mine under a permit granted by the New Mexico Environment Department. The agency and NWP are scheduled to deliver a notification of adverse conditions report on the recent rock falls early next week to Santa Fe, environment department spokeswoman Allison Majure said by email Thursday.
Likewise, the agency and its contractor have scheduled a town hall meeting in Carlsbad for Oct. 13, in which “subject matter experts from NWP and [DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office] will be on hand to provide information and answer questions relative to ground control status at WIPP,” according to the agency’s Wednesday press release about the latest collapse. Ground control refers to the periodic wall and ceiling reinforcement required to keep WIPP’s naturally shifting salt caverns from collapsing.
Shifting salt is a virtue of WIPP in DOE’s eyes, because it eventually will tightly seal in all the transuranic waste the agency places in the underground, locking it up tightly for thousands of years after the site is closed. However, with WIPP’s southern end contaminated, and most future waste disposal to take place toward the mine’s northern end, “ceiling reinforcement has been prioritized for the northern areas of the mine,” Majure wrote Thursday.
The latest collapse at WIPP was discovered Tuesday near the entrance to the disused Panel 3 storage area, which was filled to capacity with transuranic waste from across the DOE complex and has been sealed up since 2007, DOE said Wednesday. That news closely followed the discovery Sept. 27 of a separate partial ceiling collapse near Panel 4: another disposal area that has been sealed up for years, and to which access was heavily restricted for safety reasons.
Despite the headlines they grabbed in local and national media this week, rock falls in restricted areas “do not represent a safety issue or violation of regulatory standards for safety,” DOE wrote in a Wednesday press release.
Members of New Mexico’s congressional delegation — Sen. Tom Udall (D), Sen. Martin Heinrich (D) and Rep. Steve Pearce (R), whose 2nd New Mexico District includes WIPP and the city of Carlsbad — did not reply to requests for comment this week.
Panels 3 and 4 are nearby, but not adjacent, to Panel 7: the storage area where a drum of improperly packaged waste from the Los Alamos National Laboratory blew open in 2014 and leaked radiation into the mine’s southern corridor.
Of the 15 active, underground salt mines in the U.S., WIPP is among the most oft-cited for safety concerns by the Labor Department’s Mine Safety and Health Administration. The Mine Safety and Health Administration has cited WIPP 90 times so far in 2016, sometimes for ground-control issues, other times for less obvious problems, such as improperly parking drivable mining equipment in the underground.
After WIPP, the next most-cited salt mine has roughly 60 citations so far this year. Only one salt mine was cited more than WIPP. The average number of violations for these 15 mines through Thursday, based on data posted online by the mine regulator, is roughly 40.
Yet no active, underground U.S. salt mine other than WIPP was cited by the Labor Department’s mine regulator this year for concerns over the federal safety standard stipulating that “ground support shall be used where ground conditions, or mining experience in similar ground conditions in the mine, indicate that it is necessary.” However, federal law requires such controls only “in places where persons work or travel in performing their assigned tasks.”
The Energy Department’s statement noted that no one was working in the areas where personnel discovered the ceiling collapses, and that neither DOE nor NWP had plans for anybody to return to those areas in the foreseeable future. In areas not deemed safe to enter at all, even for mine inspectors, “visual observations of access drifts and bulkheads are made from outside of the prohibited areas,” DOE wrote in its Wednesday statement.“Inspections are performed on a weekly basis in order to ensure worker safety.”
Meanwhile, DOE and its contractor on Monday started what is scheduled to be a month-long contractor readiness review: a stringent, self-administered test of whether NWP is ready to resume waste disposal at WIPP using the strict, post-accident safety protocols the contractor published earlier this year.
Department and contractor officials in September said they wanted to start the readiness review the week of Sept. 26. The evaluation was once scheduled to begin in June but slid to the right after NWP took longer than expected to get its new WIPP safety rules approved.
