The Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico expects within days to take a shipment of remote-handled waste from the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, which has a higher radiation dose than most shipments over the past nearly two years.
The Argonne shipment will be one of the last WIPP takes this year prior to a three-week maintenance outage beginning in early January, noted Bruce Covert, president and project manager for WIPP management contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership. Waste emplacement is not done during the annual maintenance outage at the transuranic waste disposal facility.
Covert mentioned the upcoming shipment during a WIPP Town Hall meeting Thursday night. He said the Argonne shipment is expected within the next week.
The Energy Department said in September it plans to take the remote-handled TRU waste. Contact-handled TRU has a surface radiation dose of less than 200 millirem per hour, while remote-handled waste is 200 millirem or more. Covert stressed the remote-handled waste will be transported in a “shielded container.”
The underground disposal site last took a shipment from Argonne in 2013. The Energy Department has said it expects to receive five shipments from the lab by mid-2019.
Since it resumed taking off-site TRU waste in early 2017, WIPP has received 424 shipments from the Idaho National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, and Waste Control Specialists in Texas. The facility was shut down for about three years after a February 2014 underground radiation leak.
