The Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico should soon move into a new phase of its more than two-year effort to reopen for business, which remains on schedule for December, officials said Thursday.
The transuranic waste storage facility near Carlsbad has been closed since a fire and subsequent, unrelated radiation release in February 2014. The Department of Energy and site contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership have since then conducted incident response and site recovery and restart operations, including cleanup, installing new equipment, and implementing corrective actions called for by investigations of the incidents. In all, the recovery is expected to cost about $244 million.
The department is now reviewing the site’s updated documented safety analysis (DSA), which is intended to address all possible hazards at WIPP and ensure that the necessary safety controls are in place, said Tammy Reynolds, deputy recovery project manager for Nuclear Waste Partnership.
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board and other stakeholders have reviewed the DSA and made over 1,000 comments, which the company has been working to address and incorporate into the document, Reynolds said during the quarterly WIPP Town Hall in Carlsbad.
DOE is “getting very close to approving that document and moving into cold ops, and that’s good news,” said Todd Shrader, manager of the department’s Carlsbad Field Office, which oversees WIPP operations. He did not cite a specific schedule for approval of the documented safety analysis.
Cold operations are expected to be an eight-week period in which WIPP personnel will practice waste handling procedures using empty containers and train to follow the new safety protocols, Reynolds said. This period also offers the site a chance to ensure that equipment in the underground, some of which will be new and some of which has largely been dormant for the past two years, functions correctly, she added.
The safety procedures are “different than what they were used to using and having to comply with before the event. We need to make sure we give them sufficient run time, using the new controls, using the revised procedures, and making sure the equipment operates like it needs to, before we go into the readiness activities,” Reynolds said. “Because when you go into the readiness activities, you don’t use a readiness activity to get ready, you’re supposed to be ready and now you’re just demonstrating that readiness.”
Following cold operations, the site will go through several readiness reviews by subject matter experts, DOE contractors, and department personnel. Each review is expected to result in recommendations that will need to be addressed. The goal is to complete all those reviews and secure DOE authorization to resume waste emplacement before the end of the year.
“We’re still on pace, but it’s challenging, there will continue to be challenges, but we are still on pace to meet our mid-December startup date,” Shrader said.
The WIPP radiation release was caused by a “thermal runaway” in an improperly packaged container of nitrate salt waste from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico. That finding led the department to shift oversight of legacy waste management and environmental cleanup operations at the lab from its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration to the DOE Office of Environmental Management. The lab is now working on its own post-incident recovery.
Processing of transuranic waste has been suspended since May 2014, and will remain so “until we get a good handle on what we have, and then we’ll go forward on the processing,” Doug Hintze, manager of the Environmental Management Los Alamos Field Office (EM-LA), said at the town hall.
“We have additional drums up there, that we have to do something with those drums,” Hintze said. “So we’re evaluating what is the process that we’re going to go through as far as us to be able to treat the waste so that we can eventually send it to WIPP here, such that it meets the acceptance criteria.”
Key contributors in the radiation release were container temperature and pressure, Hintze said. The 60 remaining drums of the type linked to the WIPP incident have been isolated at LANL in metal standard waste boxes and placed in refrigeration, Hintze said. To address the pressure issue, the waste boxes will be opened starting Friday and larger vents will be installed in the containers to ensure pressure does not build.
“Between the lower temperatures that we’re maintaining and the vents in case any sort of pressure tries to build up, we’ll be able to increase the margin of safety as far as the chance of having any sort of runaway,” Hintze said.
When the laboratory is ready to treat the waste so it can be shipped to WIPP, personnel will open the containers and add the correct absorbent to separate the fuel and oxidizer to ensure there is no possibility of a reaction. It is hoped that will start in early or mid-fiscal 2017, which begins on Oct. 1 of this year. EM-LA expects to treat about one drum per day.
The EM Los Alamos Field Office, which was established in March 2015, also anticipates doubling its personnel from about 20 current staffers to 40, Hintze said.
The Department of Energy intends to separate the lab’s environmental management contract from the site operations contract now held by Los Alamos National Security. A draft request for proposals for the EM contract is now being developed and should be ready within the next couple months, Hintze said, and the new contractor is expected to be in place by the end of fiscal 2017.
