Bosses at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., are shooting for a sharp uptick in monthly transuranic waste shipments to the underground salt mine after an ongoing maintenance outage wraps up in April, according to a recent update to a federal safety board.
After seeing shipments drop to about four a week in late 2020, partially due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) management envisions upping its shipment level to seven a week in April and 10 week by May, according to a weekly Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety report dated March 5.
The DOE’s prime contractor at WIPP, Nuclear Waste Partnership, is finishing its annual maintenance outage, which began Feb.15 and is scheduled to run until about April 15. The disposal site shuts down for several weeks every year to tackle long-term maintenance tasks that could not easily be done during day-to-day operation. This year’s shutdown is lasting about twice as long as 2020’s.
The defense board document did not state a reason for the apparent optimism, although it did note workers at the facility are starting to receive vaccinations for COVID-19. Only one new COVID-19 positive test was reported at WIPP over its Facebook page for the seven days ending March 24, and the active confirmed cases at the site have remained in the low single-digits for the past several weeks— after peaking at about 20 per week last fall.
This year prior to the outage, there were 23 shipments to WIPP, according to DOE. WIPP received only 192 shipments during 2020, 100 less than the 292 logged in 2019. DOE cited the pandemic as the chief culprit.
WIPP will not achieve full waste disposal operations, such as the 700-plus shipments recorded in 2013, until a new underground ventilation system is completed in the next couple of years. WIPP went offline for about three years after a drum ruptured and caused an underground radiation leak in February 2014.
