The Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., remains on pace to have its best calendar year performance since it returned to service in 2017 following an underground accident three years earlier.
The nation’s only deep geologic disposal site for defense-related transuranic waste has received 434 shipments between Jan. 1 and Nov. 27, according to figures available through DOE’s public website for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). This easily beats WIPP’s goal for the year of 400 shipments, DOE said in a Dec. 5 press release.
There were 272 shipments received at the underground salt mine during the 2022 calendar year, according to the DOE WIPP website.
“Exceeding 400 transuranic waste shipments to WIPP this year is a positive indication of the cleanup work we’re enabling throughout the nation,” Mark Bollinger, manager of the DOE Office of Environmental Management’s Carlsbad Field Office, said in the press release.
There have been 23 shipments from Nov. 1 through Nov. 27, according to figures available through DOE’s public website on Dec. 13. It typically takes about two weeks for shipments to show up on the website.
The November figures include 16 from the Idaho National Laboratory, four from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, two from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and one from the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, according to the data.
There were 16 shipments during November 2022.
In October 2022, WIPP finished emplacing waste in Panel 7, which in February 2014 was contaminated by a radiation leak caused by the rupture of an improperly packaged drum from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. With crews now working in uncontaminated Panel 8 they no longer have to don extra amounts of personal protective gear.
WIPP was offline for about three years following the accident and its best post-accident calendar year until now was 2018 when the facility received 311 shipments.
