The Energy Department has received permission from the state of New Mexico to keep 26 containers of potentially flammable waste above ground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) until June 30, 2018.
The agency made the request on June 9 and received the OK from the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) on June 23, according to a letter uploaded late last month to the WIPP website.
“NMED hereby approves the request and extends the storage time for the specified waste in the WHB [above-ground Waste Handling Building] for one additional year,” John Kieling, chief of NMED’s Hazardous Waste Bureau, wrote in a letter to Todd Shrader and Bruce Covert — respectively the manager of DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office and the president of WIPP prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership
“If any of the above specified waste cannot be emplaced in the WIPP underground by the expiration of this deadline, the Permittees shall submit a written request to NMED, in accordance with the Permit, no later than June 15, 2018,” Kieling said. He added that NMED wants “verbal notification” after DOE and its contractor complete their reviews of the 26 containers, and again after the containers are placed underground at the mine.
The Energy Department was either supposed to clear out the WIPP Waste Handling Building by June 30, or request an extension by mid-June to keep waste there, which the agency did. DOE said it needed more time to determine if the 26 containers hold oxidizing chemicals that could produce a reaction, as happened in 2014 when an improperly packaged waste container from the Los Alamos National Laboratory blew open underground and leaked radiation into the mine.
The 26 containers are among those stranded above ground after the 2014 accident. The others have already been moved into the mine.
Twenty-two of the 26 potentially problematic containers contain inorganic sludge that originated at the now-shuttered Rocky Flats plutonium pit-production facility in Colorado. Three other containers hold “heterogeneous debris” from the Mound Laboratory in Ohio, which produced bomb parts and later recovered tritium from retired nuclear weapons. The final container that will remain above ground holds “heterogeneous debris” from the Savannah River Site’s H Canyon: one of two facilities at the site once used to chemically isolate fissile materials for nuclear weapons.
Regional WIPP Oversight Rolls On, Under Extended DOE Deal With States Group
The Council of State Governments’ Midwestern Region will continue overseeing transuranic waste shipments to WIPP for another five years, under a $1.4-million cooperative agreement-extension announced last week.
The council distributes the DOE funds to states through which transuranic waste moves on its way to WIPP.
The council’s Midwestern Region covers Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.
From early April, when WIPP reopened to waste shipments after a three-year closure prompted by the accidental radiation release, through June 22, the Energy Department had shipped 22 shipments of transuranic waste to the mine for disposal, according to the latest official DOE records.
That works out to a weekly rate of just under 2.5 shipments. DOE will have to bump that up to three a week if the agency is to meet its goal of sending 128 shipments to the mine by Jan. 21, 2018. Energy officials at WIPP have said they plan to ramp up weekly transuranic waste shipments throughout the rest of the calendar year.
