The Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., received 25 shipments of transuranic waste during October, which is marginally better than the 21 shipments during the same month in 2019.
That is according to DOE’s public database for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), which also shows shipments for this pandemic-hobbled year still lag far behind the pace for 2019.
During the first 10 months of 2019, WIPP received 275 shipments. But during the same period in 2020, the underground disposal site only received 167 shipments. That translates to a shipment reduction of almost 40%.
During October WIPP received 11 shipments from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which recently shipped to Carlsbad for the first time in 15 years. The facility also received nine from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, three from the Idaho National Laboratory, and two from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
Since March, on-site staffing limits designed to slow the spread of COVID-19 at WIPP and the DOE sites shipping transuranic waste there have generally kept shipments to no more than five a week or about half what it might otherwise take in during a good week since reopening in 2017, according to the agency. The facility, managed by the Amentum-led Nuclear Waste Partnership, suffered an underground radiation leak in February 2014 that effectively took it out of service for about three years.
WIPP is not expected to achieve its pre-2014 throughput levels until construction of a new underground ventilation system is completed. In late August the WIPP prime terminated the contractor it hired to build the ventilation system. The fired construction firm subsequently sued Nuclear Waste Partnership.
