WIPP envisions fewer shipments in fiscal 2025

While the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Eddy County, N.M., received 490 shipments during fiscal 2024, DOE envisions a more modest 425 shipments during fiscal 2025, top managers said during a public meeting last week.

For the short term at least, the rate of defense-related transuranic waste shipments is “probably going to go down a little bit and not up,” said Ken Harrawood, the president of Salado Isolation Mining Contractors. Salado is the Bechtel-led prime contractor in charge of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP).

 “We are getting into more difficult waste streams,” said Mark Bollinger, DOE Carlsbad Field Office manager. For example, while there is lots of defense-related transuranic waste at the Hanford Site in Washington state, it tends to be buried in shallow ground and is not yet packaged and certified for shipment to WIPP, Bollinger said. Also, Hanford’s top priority is addressing the site’s 56 million gallons of liquid radioactive waste, not processing transuranic waste, Bollinger said.

Similar situations can be found to lesser degrees at other DOE generator sites, Bollinger said. There’s a lot of transuranic waste at the sites but much of it is not ready to hit the road to WIPP, he added.

The DOE and contractor manager were responding to questions raised during a town hall style public meeting Oct. 24 in Las Vegas, N.M.

When WIPP first started receiving waste at the salt mine disposal site in 1999, there were huge backlogs of waste ready to be shipped from Idaho National Laboratory and the Rocky Flats plant in Colorado, Harrawood said. A couple of times in the early years, WIPP exceeded 1,000 shipments annually, the contractor boss said. For the short term at least, WIPP shipments are likely not to exceed 500 per year, he added.

Much packaged transuranic waste built up around the weapons complex, DOE managers have said, in the three years following a 2014 underground radiation leak that idled WIPP and damaged the underground.

WIPP is currently 44% full, according to the joint presentation by Bollinger and Harrawood. The facility has disposed of 2.7 million cubic feet out of its 6.2 million cubic feet limit, they said.