The Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., received 64 shipments of transuranic waste during June, according to DOE’s public website.
The Idaho National Laboratory was as usual the top generator, sending 50 shipments to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). Meanwhile eight shipments of defense-related transuranic waste came to WIPP from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and six from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
The 64 shipments during June exceed the 56 received at the underground salt mine during June 2023. So far in the 2024 calendar year, WIPP has received 242 shipments of transuranic waste up from 230 during the first six months of 2023.
During the first three quarters of fiscal 2024, the WIPP traffic amounted to 356 shipments up from 328 shipments between Oct. 1, 2022 and June 30, 2023, according to the WIPP data.
WIPP’s shipments of transuranic waste have generally been trending upward, since November 2022 when crews started disposing of drums in Panel 8. Unlike the prior Panel 7, Panel 8 is free of contamination caused by a February 2014 radiation leak that stopped WIPP shipments for about three years. Because Panel 8 is free of the radioactive contamination, it does not require workers to don as much safety gear at the start of every shift, according to DOE.
Last month, DOE and its WIPP prime Bechtel-led Salado Isolation Mining Contractors announced construction completion of the Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System. Once commissioning is done, DOE says the new ventilation system should triple underground airflow to 540,000 cubic feet per minute.
The legacy ventilation system was degraded by the 2014 accident. The new one, together with other infrastructure upgrades, should enable WIPP to return to pre-2014 traffic levels, when the disposal site would occasionally hit more than 700 shipments annually, DOE has said.
2023 marked the best post-shutdown year so far with 489 shipments. Transuranic waste includes remnants of old tools, rags, clothing and debris used in past nuclear work.