The Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., by taking 133 shipments of transuranic waste from around the DOE complex during 2017, beat its own target for resuming waste emplacement.
Last March, during a WIPP Town Hall presentation, DOE Carlsbad Field Office Manager Todd Shrader publicly identified a target of 128 shipments from April 2017 to this month. Shrader had predicted shipments would ramp up from two to four per week by the end of 2017. WIPP averaged more than five shipments per week by the end of the year, Bruce Covert, president and project manager at WIPP operations prime Nuclear Waste Partnership, said in a town hall presentation in December.
WIPP also had a busy first week of January, receiving six shipments of transuranic waste, according to the latest publicly available data. Four of the first 2018 shipments came from the Idaho National Laboratory and two came from Waste Control Specialists in Texas.
After an extended outage following a February 2014 underground fire and radiological release, WIPP resumed operations in December 2016 and started receiving waste shipments again last April. The Idaho National Laboratory made 88 of the 2017 shipments, followed by WCS with 18, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee with 17, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina with nine, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico with one.
