Managers at the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., plan more training to help ensure no mislabeled or improperly packaged shipments reach the underground disposal site for defense transuranic waste.
Some training could be rolled out in the near future to minimize the chance of any shipments ending up at WIPP without passing muster through its waste acceptance criteria, Kirk Lachman, acting manager for DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, said July 11 during the quarterly WIPP Town Hall forum.
Lachman did not provide details, but seemed to indicate the training could cover WIPP and its waste generator sites. Another agency source suggested by telephone Wednesday the training might be sought agency-wide by headquarters, and expressed doubts it would lead to any pause in waste shipments at WIPP.
At the conclusion of the quarterly Town Hall, Lachman said the Carlsbad Field Office plans to sweat the details when it comes to complying with a DOE-wide assessment of procedures for packaging and shipping radioactive waste.
The review, to be conducted by DOE’s Office of Enterprise Assessments, was directed in a July 9 memo from Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette. The assessment was ordered after the agency determined mislabeled waste was sent to the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) for six years.
Nine shipments with a total of 32 containers were sent to the NNSS from the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., between 2013 and 2018, the Energy Department acknowledged recently. The shipments could have included some mixed-low-level waste, rather than just low-level waste, DOE told Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak (D).
The review is “looking at all waste shipments and waste certification activities,” including transuranic waste, Lachman said. “We are getting our transuranic waste from the Oak Ridge cleanup side,” which involves a different group of employees than those dealing with LLW at Y-12, he added.
The WIPP waste criteria, strengthened after a 2014 accident that forced the disposal site out of service for nearly three years, is meant to prevent emplacement of any material that is mislabeled, improperly packaged, or containing potentially combustible elements.
Lachman said salt mining and other work would continue at WIPP “if we have a halt in waste shipments” to the underground site as a result of the safety review. The waste shipments to Nevada have been suspended while DOE investigates.
Overall, Lachman expects the assessment will have minimal impact on WIPP, as many certified shipments are already on their way to the disposal site.
New Strategic Plan in the Works
The contractor for WIPP is working on a five-year strategic plan that should be submitted to the agency and made public in August or September.
Workshops on the contents of the plan will be held in Carlsbad and Santa Fe, N.M., sometime in those two months. Lachman and Bruce Covert, president and project manager for WIPP contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership, alluded to the report during the meeting.
Nuclear Waste Partnership produced a strategic plan in June 2016, while WIPP was still offline due to a February 2014 underground radiation leak. Operations resumed in January 2017.
The new plan being prepared by AECOM-led NWP will feature an extensive health and safety section, Covert said. It will extend past the end of its current contract, he added during the Town Hall presentation in Carlsbad. Nuclear Waste Partnership’s 10-year, $2 billion contract would run through September 2022, provided DOE picks up its final two-year extension by September 2020.
So far during fiscal 2019, WIPP has received 229 shipments of transuranic waste, officials said. The underground disposal facility’s target for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30 is 350 shipments. The underground salt mine received 166 shipments from January through June, according to publicly available data.
Separately, Lachman said the U.S. House of Representatives meeting the full $398 million White House budget request for WIPP for fiscal 2020 indicates strong support for the disposal site. That would be $5 million less than the enacted funding level for fiscal 2019, but it should not prove a major problem as some money is expected to remain from this year due to the slower than expected pace of subcontracting awards, he added.
An oil and gas boom in New Mexico increased WIPP’s competition for both vendors and employees in recent years.
