The Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant received 41 shipments of defense-related transuranic waste in July, making it one of the busier months since the COVID-19 pandemic started spreading in the United States in early 2020.
Last month’s total is up from the 23 shipments in July 2020, during deep pandemic times. It is also higher than the 31 recorded in July 2019, according to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) public website.
More than half of July’s shipments, 21, came from the Idaho National Laboratory. The rest originated at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
Seven months into calendar year 2022, WIPP has received 137 shipments of transuranic waste. During the same period in 2020, the facility had received 109 shipments.
With 311 shipments, calendar year 2018 was WIPP’s busiest since reopening in 2017 after a roughly three-year hiatus following February 2014’s underground radiation leak. The 2018 total is still a long way from the 724 shipments WIPP received in 2013, the last full year of operation prior to the accident.
DOE does not expect to reach anything like the 2013 level again until WIPP’s Safety Significant Confined Ventilation System is constructed and operational, notionally sometime after 2024. The new ventilation system should increase underground airflow to about 540,000 cubic feet per minute or roughly three times the current level. The new system should allow WIPP to simultaneously emplace waste, mine new disposal areas and do maintenance.
The House of Representatives as well as the Senate Appropriations Committee and DOE have all proposed spending $430 million at WIPP in fiscal 2022, up from $413 million in fiscal 2021, which ends Sept. 30.
