Brian Bradley
WC Monitor
10/2/2015
Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz on Tuesday reaffirmed his department’s belief that the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico is on track to reopen by the end of next year. His statement came two months after DOE acknowledged that it would not be possible to resume operations at the underground transuranic waste storage facility by the planned March 2016 date. “This has been a terribly costly situation to all of us, across the complex, because of the ripple effects of WIPP’s closure,” Moniz said during an address at DOE’s first National Cleanup Workshop, in Arlington, Va. “We will not lose focus on the safety. In terms of our recovery, we’ve had some glitches, but we are on track for a 2016 startup of operations.”
Moniz said WIPP’s reopening would pave the way for the facility to accept scheduled shipments of transuranic waste stored at DOE sites across the country. The department has not determined a numbered order for shipments after WIPP resumes operations, but Frank Marcinowski, acting associate principal deputy assistant secretary for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, said waste that is sitting on WIPP’s surface would be emplaced first. “We expect that we’ll be going through that exercise in the coming year,” Marcinowski said at the workshop. “But right now, it would be premature to do that.”
WIPP stopped accepting shipments of TRU waste from other nuclear sites following a fire and subsequent, unrelated radiation release in February 2014. DOE said last September it anticipated resuming waste intake in March 2016 upon completion of a projected $242 million rehabilitation project in the underground facility. However, on July 31 it said challenges including faulty equipment and additional “safety-related activities” would force the plan to be revised. For example, the site’s ventilation system has been preventing the use of multiple pieces of equipment at one time, but Marcinowski said a “hybrid bolter” was expected to start operating this week at WIPP, which should afford greater efficiency than other versions of that equipment. The bolter assists with “ground control” work, which includes securing and recovering underground pathways. “Now, we’ve got a bolter that runs on both diesel and electric, and so we’re going to be able to run both these units simultaneously, and speed up our efforts in that regard,” he said. Prerequisites for waste emplacement operations include installation and testing of interim and supplemental ventilation, completion of safety documentation and safety management program development, management assessments, and operational readiness reviews.
The largest physical example of WIPP’s shipment backlog sits at the Idaho Site, which houses 706 loads designated for transfer—including 60 remote-handled shipments and a total of 18,000 waste drums—according to Jack Zimmerman, deputy manager for the Idaho Cleanup Project at DOE’s Idaho Operations Office. Zimmerman estimated that shipping that material to WIPP will cost approximately $20 million per year starting in 2020. Most of Idaho’s material was shipped to the state from different facilities, principally the now-decommissioned Rocky Flats in Colorado, and Idaho now has more waste destined for WIPP than any other EM site. “The focus is to have all of the TRU waste out of the state of Idaho by 2018,” he said. “We know that that’s going to be very challenging.”
After WIPP restarts, managers hope the facility can start accepting five shipments a week and eventually ramp up to 10, Marcinowski said. Approximately 1,400 shipments of waste per year land at WIPP when the facility is fully functional, Mark Frei, COO of consulting firm Longenecker & Associates, said during the workshop.
Earlier this year, DOE released its final Accident Investigation Board report into the root cause of the 2014 radiological release. The AIB drafted 143 corrective actions for WIPP contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership to take; as of this week, management certified that 118 of those were complete, according to NWP Project Manager Phil Breidenbach.
DOE expects to complete the documented safety analysis for WIPP by January, and to develop a new WIPP project management baseline based on the current schedule and expected cost impacts by winter, according to briefing slides from Marcinowski’s presentation. The new performance baseline “actually integrates the base and recovery operations, and we’re reviewing that right now,” Marcinowski said. “We didn’t announce a revision to the opening date, because we wanted to ensure ourselves that we had a fair degree of confidence in whatever schedule we came out with to replace the March of ’16 date, and so we’re working our way through that process. We’re hoping that later this fall, we’ll be able to identify a new resumption date.”
Progress toward reopening continues. Workers have completed zone recovery activities along a pathway to Panel 7, after “months of catch-up rock bolting and contamination mitigation,” WIPP announced late last week. The 2014 radiological release occurred in Panel 7. “Panel 7, which consists of seven disposal rooms … will be the active disposal area when waste emplacement activities resume,” a WIPP press release states. “Initial closure of Panel 7 Room 7 was completed in May 2015.”
Panel 7 will no longer require people to wear “additional” radiological protection equipment, yet it is and will remain posted as a “contamination area,” according to the release. “Periodic application of the water spray is necessary to minimize potential airborne contamination,” DOE said. “Procedures for the handoff of waste from the uncontaminated controlled area to the contaminated area within Panel 7 will be developed and tested prior to commencing waste emplacement.”
