The Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., is nearing resumption of underground disposal operations following discovery of a misaligned drum inside a waste canister last week.
The agency temporarily suspended transuranic waste disposal after the May 24 event within Room 5 of Panel 7 at the underground salt mine. Normal operations could resume within days, Donavan Mager, spokesman for WIPP contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership, said on Wednesday.
An update was not immediately available on Friday.
Some salt mining in Panel 8 and maintenance operations in other parts of the underground have continued while waste disposal was suspended, Mager said.
Workers noticed the odd drum alignment at about 7:30 p.m. local time and stopped waste disposal work. One of the seven drums in a waste canister was “leaning,” or not lined up with the other drums, Mager said. None of the canisters were damaged, and there was no sign of a radiological release.
The 36 workers who were underground at the time were evacuated in keeping with safety procedures. The WIPP emergency center was activated, then deactivated by 10:30 p.m. that day. Workers have stayed away from the affected room since May 24.
The contractor will soon implement its re-entry plan into the underground and the storage panel where the incident occurred, Mager said. Once inside, workers will fix the canister so it can be emplaced, Mager has said.
The DOE generator site of the canister has not been identified. Mager said that will be covered in the investigation.
The underground repository reopened to outside shipments in April 2017 following a nearly three-year shutdown after a February 2014 underground radiation release. As of May 17, the latest date for which data is publicly available, WIPP had received 125 shipments of transuranic waste in 2018.
