Months before a state regulatory deadline, the Energy Department and its prime contractor at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant have stopped using emergency above-ground waste storage space at the mine, according to a Monday regulatory filing.
“On February 9, 2017, [DOE and Nuclear Waste Partnership] reconfigured the TRU [transuranic] mixed waste in storage in the Waste Handling Building such that TRU mixed waste has been removed from the CH Bay Surge Storage Area,” the agency and its partner wrote in a March 20 report to the New Mexico Environment Department.
The Waste Handling Building is a way station where transuranic waste shipped to New Mexico from across the DOE complex is prepped for underground disposal at WIPP. About a third of the building’s 135 cubic meters of waste storage space for so-called contact-handled transuranic waste is reserved for what is known as “surge storage”: space that may only be used during emergencies such as the roughly three-year WIPP shutdown that formally ended in December.
The mine closed in 2014 after an accidental underground radiation release and earlier, unrelated fire. After the accidents, DOE placed some transuranic waste in the surge storage area; as a condition of reopening WIPP, New Mexico told DOE and NWP they could only use that space in the Waste Handling Building through June 30.
DOE is expected to resume shipping waste to WIPP in April, after clearing out the waste stranded above-ground following the 2014 accidents. Some 130 shipments are slated to be shipped to WIPP from April through January.
