The Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico is expected to receive 170 shipments of transuranic waste from the Idaho National Laboratory between August 2017 and August 2018, officials said during a WIPP Town Hall last week in the city of Carlsbad.
Idaho will account for nearly two-thirds of the 258 anticipated total shipments to the storage mine during that period, though DOE Carlsbad Field Office Manager Todd Shrader stressed these are just estimated totals. Relocating the material out has been a priority, as a 1995 settlement agreement with the state government requires DOE to remove all transuranic waste from Idaho by the end of 2018 – though the department has acknowledged it could miss that deadline.
It had shipped about 55,000 of the 65,000 cubic meters of material on-site by early 2014, when a pair of accidents closed WIPP for nearly three years.
The No. 2 shipper to WIPP during the August-to-August period will be the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, with an estimated 40; the Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico, with 20; Waste Control Specialists in West Texas, with 18; and the Savannah River Site, with 10.
As of last week, WIPP had received 73 shipments since April. Of that number, Idaho has sent 48, Oak Ridge 5, Savannah River 9 and Waste Control Specialists 11, according to DOE data.
WIPP is a deep geologic repository that takes transuranic waste that has a hazardous component and radioactive elements heavier than uranium.
DOE recently awarded a $19.3 million contract to WCS for continued storage in West Texas of transuranic waste from Los Alamos. This includes storage of 113 drums that contain “inappropriately remediated nitrate salts” similar to the container from Los Alamos that blew open at WIPP in 2014. The problem containers will remain at the WCS site in Andrews County, Texas for the near future.
