WIPP Recovery to Continue on Schedule Despite Proposed Funding Cut
Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
2/2/2015
Within the next two months, the Department of Energy plans to release the Accident Investigation Board report into the root cause of last year’s radiological release at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz said today. The Department has been working for nearly a year on its investigation into what triggered the Feb. 14 release in the facility’s underground that has shut down WIPP operations. “It’s very close. It will be out in this quarter,” Moniz said during a briefing with reporters on DOE’s Fiscal year 2016 budget request, made public today. “Certainly our understanding is that first of all, not only the report but the observations continue to support that there was one container that was the issue and secondly it would be fair to say that the combination of materials that could have driven an exothermic event has essentially been confirmed.”
Operations at WIPP have been suspended since February 2014, when a haul truck fire and subsequent radiological release shut down the plant, leading to complex-wide impacts to DOE’s transuranic waste program. The release is believed to have originated from a reaction that caused a breach in a drum of waste processed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. DOE had originally said it hoped to wrap up its investigation into the root cause of the event by the end of 2014, but delays in a project to photograph waste drums has held back its completion. That project is now underway and is expected to be complete in the coming weeks.
DOE Proposes $76M Cut for WIPP
DOE is now working to resume operations at WIPP, and officials said today that such recovery efforts would continue on schedule despite a significant funding cut for WIPP proposed in DOE’s FY 16 request. Initial waste emplacement operations are scheduled to resume at a limited pace in March 2016, roughly in line with the schedule set by the WIPP Recovery Plan DOE released last fall. The request proposes a funding level next year for WIPP of $248 million, down from current funding levels of $324 million. The request includes $87 million for recovery activities, compared to $127 million in recovery funding provided in FY’15. “The decrease from the FY 2015 Enacted level is attributed to reduced requirements for recovery activities to support interim operations in FY 2016,” the request says. The remaining funding goes to WIPP base operations and maintenance, the Central Characterization Project, transportation and safeguards and security.
In a call with reporters today, acting Assistant Energy Secretary for Environmental Management Mark Whitney defended the proposed cut by saying that DOE had been able to “front load” much of cost for the recovery effort due to the budget boost in FY’15. “Our traditional historical level for Carlsbad has been about $220 million, so you are talking about a $100 million increase from the typical level. That really front-loaded a lot of the recovery and we believe that the budget of $248 requested in ’16, which is almost $30 million more than typical WIPP levels, that that is the funding we need to support recovery and resumption of operations in the first quarter of calendar year ’16,” he said.
Whitney added that he is “almost 100 percent certain” that additional funding would not allow WIPP to restart waste emplacement any sooner than the current schedule. “There are a lot of things that we have to go through between now and then to begin receiving waste and begin placing it underground again, and so at this point it’s not a funding issue. We have the funding in ’15 and the funding request in ’16 will support that,” he said.
The WIPP Recovery Plan released by DOE in October called for initial operations at the facility to resume in 2016 at a cost of about $242 million. After the restart in 2016, operations will initially be limited by airflow underground until the installation of a new permanent ventilation system and construction of a new exhaust shaft. Those capital asset projects are expected to take more years to complete under DOE’s project management guidelines. The FY 2016 request includes $7.5 million in line-item funding for a new exhaust shaft and $23.2 million for the construction of the new ventilation system. Under DOE’s project management guidelines, the Department is also currently reviewing alternatives to the new shaft. One alternative includes instead installing a filtration facility to filter all of the air in the underground, which could have less regulatory hurdles and be in place quicker than the new shaft. However, in the long-term a filtration facility would be more difficult to maintain.
