The contractor for the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., 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. Kirk Lachman, acting manager for DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, and Bruce Covert, president and project manager for WIPP contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership, alluded to the report during a meeting last Thursday.
The 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 quarter WIPP 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 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.
The lesser level would 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.
