LAS VEGAS — By April, the first shipments of transuranic waste since 2014 could be rolling into the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., according to a nominal timeline provided here by a DOE official at the ExchangeMonitor’s 2016 RadWaste Summit.
The April date assumes DOE approves WIPP prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) to proceed with the long-planned reopening of the nation’s only disposal facility for transuranic waste in January: about a month later than the December restart date the customer and its contractor targeted in a schedule published earlier this year.
DOE and NWP officials both held to the December date in public comments here, but a Weapons Complex Monitor analysis of milestones completed so far shows the WIPP restart is about 30 days behind pace. The department built about 70 days of margin into the WIPP restart, but those were consumed by the late delivery of a complicated new safety document detailing how workers should dispose of waste in the now-radio-contaminated underground mine.
That document was the roadmap for the waste-disposal dress rehearsals known as cold operations, which concluded Aug. 24 after taking two weeks longer than expected.
Whether DOE and NWP pull off the December restart or take even longer than January to reopen the mine, delivery of transuranic waste generated by decades of Cold War arms production should resume “approximately two to three months after authorization to proceed,” Todd Shrader, manager of DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, said during a question-and-answer session at the end of a presentation on the WIPP reopening and the outlook for U.S. transuranic waste.
It will take about that long, Shrader said, for WIPP to inter more than 230 containers of waste that arrived at the facility before the underground fire and unrelated radiation release shuttered the mine in 2014. Those containers are in temporary storage above-ground at WIPP’s Waste Handling Building. Once those containers are underground, WIPP will be able to accept new shipments.
While workers at WIPP dispose of the waste marooned above the mine more than two years ago, officials with the Carlsbad Field Office will be busy certifying that transuranic waste packaging and shipping programs at the agency’s various defense nuclear sites meet the stricter new WIPP Waste Acceptance Criteria DOE approved in July.
“We’re still working to certify sites,” Shrader said in a brief interview after a panel discussion with NWP WIPP Deputy Project Manager and Recovery Manager Jim Blankenhorn. “We anticipate having those recertifications complete prior to when it would be possible to ship waste. Our goal is not to open and then not have waste on the road.”
It is not yet clear which defense nuclear site will get to ship its backlogged waste to WIPP first, although an executive with a Hanford Site contractor said here Wednesday that the DOE facility, a former plutonium production operation near Richland Wash., will be last.
“Hanford’s at the end of the shipping queue,” Connie Simiele, vice president of the nuclear waste and fuels management project for Hanford cleanup contractor CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co., said Thursday in a question-and-answer session from the stage after another RadWaste Summit panel.
