SUMMERLIN, NEV. — The manager of the Department of Energy’s Carlsbad, N.M., field office expects the major new ventilation system for the transuranic waste disposal site could start up sometime in 2024.
“Preliminary commissioning” work on the Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System should start this calendar year, said Mark Bollinger, who heads the Carlsbad Field Office, which oversees the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) said here Wednesday during Exchange Monitor’s Radwaste Summit 2.0.
Some degree of operation of the system, designed to triple underground airflow at the underground salt mine, should begin in 2024, Bollinger said. The Carlsbad manager’s comments came in response to a question from the Exchange Monitor.
The overall project is about 83% complete, Bollinger said.
Such a timeline would be earlier than the 2025-2026 target briefed by the head of DOE’s new prime contractor, Bechtel’s Salado Isolation Mining, during a March presentation at the Waste Management Symposia in Phoenix.
Once it comes online, the new $500-million ventilation system will triple WIPP’s underground airflow to roughly 540,000 cubic feet per minute, according to DOE. This should enable WIPP to simultaneously do mining, waste emplacement and maintenance.
WIPP has not been able to do all three at once since a February 2014 underground radiation leak. The accident forced WIPP offline for about three years and then drastically slowed emplacement of waste in the irradiated panel when the mine reopened.
In his Wednesday presentation, as part of a spent fuel panel discussion, Bollinger said a key portion of the project, the Salt Reduction Building on the WIPP surface, is 97% complete. Installation of underground fans is about 65% complete, Bollinger said.
The new underground utility shaft being dug at WIPP is now more than 1,700 feet deep, and will eventually reach almost 2,300 feet deep into the mine, Bollinger said in his slide presentation.
