The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) could next week accept its first shipment of transuranic waste from an Energy Department nuclear cleanup site in more than three years, a source in New Mexico said this week.
DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office projected in January that WIPP would begin taking in new shipments this month, though the agency has not been more specific about the timeline in the ensuing months. A spokesperson for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management in Washington, D.C., did not reply to a request for comment Thursday.
WIPP, the only permanent underground disposal facility for the radioactively contaminated material and equipment known as transuranic waste, reopened in December after a long closure. In February, workers cleared out enough space in its above-ground Waste Handling Building to begin accepting new shipments from across the DOE complex.
It still is not clear which DOE site will ship to WIPP first, though the agency has narrowed it down to one of three: privately owned Waste Control Specialists in Andrews, Texas; the Idaho Site; and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
After those three get their turn, DOE will move waste from the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
The five early bird facilities will combine for about 130 shipments between April and January, DOE estimates. The agency plans to accept two shipments a week, ramping up to as many as five by the end of the year, Todd Shrader, manager of the Carlsbad Field Office, said in March at an industry conference.
Of the four DOE sites, only the Los Alamos National Laboratory had not had its transuranic waste characterization program approved by the New Mexico Environment Department, WIPP’s state regulator, at press time for Weapons Complex Monitor. The department does not have jurisdiction over Waste Control Specialists’ Texas facility, which is storing WIPP-bound transuranic waste generated at Los Alamos. Some of that waste contains the same potentially explosive mix of organic cat litter and nitrate salts that caused the 2014 radiation leak that shut WIPP down for nearly three years.
WIPP has operated more or less smoothly since waste disposal resumed in January. DOE and site contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership first had to emplace waste that had been marooned above the mine after the February 2014 radiation leak before they could accept new shipments from off-site.
In a relatively minor hiccup, DOE lost about a day of work at WIPP on March 24, when workers evacuated the mine after an air-sampling device threw a spark and a puff of smoke that DOE reported to New Mexico as a fire, “although no flame was observed,” according to a regulatory filing published online Wednesday. Nobody was hurt by the malfunctioning equipment, and no transuranic or hazardous waste was disturbed in the incident, according to the filing .
