The Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico won’t launch its regular winter maintenance outage this month or next, deferring such work until fall, when an electrical substation was scheduled to be replaced.
The annual maintenance outage, together with replacement of the roughly 30-year old surface Substation 3 at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), should last about 80 days, said Donavan Mager, spokesman for WIPP prime Nuclear Waste Partnership.
“The decision was made to do the outage in the fall to avoid interfering with current waste shipments since WIPP cannot receive and process waste while substation 3 is being replaced,” Mager said in an email late last week to Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
The new substation weighs about 46,000 pounds and arrived at WIPP in a special container earlier this month, according to a Twitter posting last week by DOE’s WIPP.
Substation 3 is nearing the end of its service life and needs to be updated, Mager said. Substations at WIPP reduce or “step down” the 13,800 volts provided by the utility into usable voltages for site equipment. The cost of the project is about $1.5 million. The construction does not require participation by electric utility Xcel Energy, the spokesman added.
Coming into 2021, the prime contractor was hoping to have the new substation installed by June 30, 2021, according to the contractor’s Performance Evaluation and Measurement Plan.
