After a three-year hiatus, the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., should resume salt mining in a matter of days, according to site management and operations contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP).
The resumption would mark another key step toward a return to normalcy for the nation’s only permanent underground disposal site for transuranic waste.
A pair of February 2014 accidents forced WIPP offline for nearly three years. The facility resumed taking waste shipments from other DOE sites in April; it had accepted 118 TRU waste shipments as of Nov. 21, the most recent date for which public data is available. The waste shipments amounted to 689,473 pounds or 868 waste containers.
During a Dec. 6 WIPP Town Hall meeting in Carlsbad, NWP President and Project Manager Bruce Covert said resumption of salt mining was the contractor’s next major objective. The immediate work, to expand Panel 8 in the underground, is needed to create more storage space.
Two new salt trucks have been acquired for the mining operation and are now underground, Covert said during his presentation, adding that maintenance and testing has been done on the needed mining equipment.
Mining should resume “any day now,” NWP spokesman Donavan Mager said by email Thursday.
While they have offered no estimates on mining volume, WIPP officials say the ramp-up will be slow and methodical. “As we did with waste handling, we will take a slow, deliberate approach to mining until our operators are comfortable with the process,” Mager said.
Salt is shipped out of the mine using a hoist. The salt is deposited in dump trucks that move the material to the WIPP salt tailing pile. Meanwhile, WIPP continues to wait for a rock fall to occur in Room 6 of storage Panel 7, which for months has been off-limits wo workers. That is expected to occur in the next several weeks, based on ground monitoring.
WIPP Seeks to Modify New Mexico Permit to Build New Air Shaft
Meanwhile, WIPP is seeking to modify its New Mexico hazardous waste facility permit in order to dig a new ventilation shaft to increase underground airflow.
The new shaft will extend from the surface to the underground mine. The shaft is a major facet of the new permanent ventilation system planned for WIPP. The Energy Department and Nuclear Waste Partnership filed the modification request with the New Mexico Environment Department in November. The state agency did not immediately return an email seeking comment on the review process.
The new ventilation system should be complete in 2022. It would increase airflow in the underground disposal facility to 540,000 cubic feet per minute, exceeding the airflow level at the time of the 2014 accidents. The new system is meant to ensure WIPP can simultaneously conduct full-scale mining and waste emplacement operations.
Airflow was drastically reduced in the mine to prevent the release of radiation after a waste container burst open on Feb. 14, 2014. The site has in the years since installed interim and supplemental ventilation systems to increase airflow.
Shaft No. 5, as it is referred to in the permit modification request, would be located about 1,200 feet west of the existing air intake shaft. It would become the chief source of intake air for the underground facility.
On the surface, Shaft No. 5 will be equipped with a steel cover to keep the intake air moving to the underground. The exhaust shaft will be procured separately from most of the surface buildings for the permanent ventilation system. WIPP is still developing a cost estimate for the new shaft.
The other big capital asset project connected with the new permanent ventilation system is a complex on the surface that will encompass a 55,000-square-foot filter building, a salt reduction building that is about half that size, and standby diesel generators and various ancillary equipment.
A request for proposals for construction of these surface buildings connected could be issued within weeks, with a pre-bid conference scheduled for Jan. 9 in Carlsbad, officials said last week during the WIPP Town Hall meeting. The RFP that will be the subject of that meeting will probably be valued at over $80 million, Mager said.
