A pair of public meetings have been scheduled in March on proposed changes in the New Mexico hazardous waste facility permit for the U.S. Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
The meetings, scheduled in Carlsbad and Santa Fe, will focus on clarifying transuranic “Mixed Waste Disposal Volume Reporting,” according to a recent notice posted online by WIPP and Nuclear Waste Partnership, management and operations contractor for the disposal site for DOE transuranic waste.
In a nutshell, the empty space or air between drums in a standard waste container would no longer be counted as waste when volume is measured. Advocates of the change have said in the past this would be a more accurate method of counting waste as it accrues in the underground mine.
Critics, though, suggest DOE is proposing a formula to reduce the amount of waste recorded on paper as being disposed at WIPP in order to delay the point at which the site exceeds its volume cap under the 1992 WIPP Land Withdrawal Act, which is 6.2 million cubic feet of transuranic waste.
The Energy Department declined to discuss the permit modification request ahead of the meetings. The New Mexico Environment Department (NMED), the state regulator for WIPP, also declined comment.
But watchdog groups in New Mexico and beyond expressed concern about the application.
“[T]hey hope to recalculate the way waste volume is recorded,” said Scott Kovac, operations and research director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, in a Wednesday email.
Kovac said the change sought by WIPP could effectively reduce waste volume being recorded by a third going forward. In essence, DOE would no longer count the space around the drums in a standard waste basket as part of the waste, he said.
Currently, a standard basket containing four 55-gallon drums is recorded as 1.2 cubic meters of waste. Under the permit modification, the amount of waste recorded would be only 0.84 cubic meters, accounting for the gaps around the drums.
This is important because “WIPP is starting to fill [waste storage] Panel 7 (of 10 originally proposed) which is like 70% of the space, available for disposal, Kovac said.
The Land Withdrawal Act doesn’t deal with space, only with volume, Kovac said. Under current trends, “WIPP runs out of space before it reaches its the allowed limit of 176,000 m3,” Kovac said in the email. WIPP has received more than 12,000 shipments of TRU waste since opening in 1999.
It was not entirely clear if the modification would apply to waste already empaneled.
“We see this as one part of a multi-faceted effort to expand WIPP,” according to Kovac, in terms of actual waste being stored underground. This could open the door for only counting the amount of actual waste inside any given drum, although the current WIPP proposal doesn’t go that far, he said.
The head of a nuclear watchdog group in South Carolina said the proposed change could have implications for the Savannah River Site in his state.
“It’s clear that a recalculation of the volume of TRU waste canisters would allow larger quantities of downblended surplus plutonium to be shipped from SRS to WIPP,” SRS Watch Director Tom Clements said in a Thursday email. “SRS has already shipped a small quantity of downblended plutonium to WIPP and has approval to package 6 metric tons for such disposal. If the MOX [mixed oxide] project were to be terminated, the entire 13 metric tons of plutonium now stored at SRS could end up going to WIPP.”
The Energy Department’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration in 2016 approved downblending to a TRU waste form a tranche of 6 metric tons of non-pit plutonium stored at the Savannah River Site.
DOE’s disposal needs could grow more acute if it should cancel completion of the MOX facility at SRS, which is being built to convert 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-grade plutonium into commercial reactor fuel. The Trump administration has favored canceling the project in favor of downblending the plutonium and shipping the resulting waste to WIPP.
The federal agency and its contractor on Jan. 31 filed an application with the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) for a Class 2 modification to WIPP’s hazardous waste permit.
Among other things, the permit modification seeks to “Clarify that Final TRU Mixed Waste Volumes reported by the Permittees are based on outermost disposal container volumes,” according to the memo. The change to the “outermost container volume” could start with the report filed for Panel 6.
The permit modification also seeks to add some definitions to “distinguish between Transuranic (TRU) Mixed Waste Volume and Land Withdrawal Act (LWA) TRU Waste Volume of Record.” The modifications would further recognize separate reporting for the volume of record and the Land Withdrawal Act.
WIPP also seeks to revised part of its permit “to ensure consistency between the process design capacity and the maximum capacities of the Hazardous Waste Disposal Units allowed by the Permit in Part 4.”
The public meetings are set for Tuesday, March 6, from 5 p.m.-7 p.m. local time at the Skeen-Whitlock Building, 4021 National Parks Highway in Carlsbad; and on Thursday, March 8, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. at the Courtyard Marriott, 3347 Cerrillos Road in Santa Fe.
Public comments will be taken at the meetings. Written comments for the record must be sent by April 3 to NMED’s Ricardo Maestas at [email protected].
After Maintenance Break, WIPP Resumes Taking Waste
Having completed a two-week maintenance outage, WIPP can do same-day salt mining and waste disposal at the underground facility, a spokesman said last week.
The outage finished Jan. 28, and WIPP actually resumed taking TRU waste the week of Jan. 22, Donavan Mager, a spokesperson for NWP, said by email Monday. The contractor completed 17 different maintenance jobs during the outage, including resurfacing the contact-handled bay floor in the Waste Handling Building and installing additional power to the server room.
Nuclear Waste Partnership is “very close” to hiring a director of mining, Mager added without offering specifics. DOE called for the addition of a mining chief last September when it extended NWP’s contract for three years, through September 2020. The extension period is valued at roughly $928 million, DOE has said.
In January WIPP resumed limited underground salt mining for the first time since the mine was taken offline following a pair of February 2014 accidents. The site reopened nearly three years later, and resumed taking waste from other DOE sites in April 2017.
Thanks to deployment of the supplemental ventilation system, WIPP now has the additional airflow needed to do both salt mining and waste disposal at the same time, Mager said. “However, we are taking a crawl-walk-run approach to mining in Panel 8, so waste emplacement and mining activities aren’t regularly taking place at the same time,” Mager said. Total airflow is now roughly 114,000 cubic feet per minute (CFM). Installation of a new permanent ventilation system in 2022 should increase the airflow to about 540,000 CFM.
Mining is now taking place seven days per week on the day shift, while waste emplacement is conducted four days per week on the second shift, roughly 3 p.m. through 1 a.m., the spokesman said.
The latest publicly available data indicates WIPP received nine waste shipments between Jan. 1 and Jan. 24. WIPP received 133 shipments during its roughly nine months of waste operations in 2017.
During 2013, which was WIPP’s last full year of operation, the site received 724 shipments, according to publicly available data. During the 2012 calendar year, WIPP received 839 shipments.
