The Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., expects to start receiving remote-handled transuranic waste from the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois by the end of this year, DOE Carlsbad Field Office Manager Todd Shrader said recently.
“We are about to add a new site, Argonne, this fall,” Shrader said Sept. 12 at the DOE’s National Cleanup Workshop in Alexandria, Va.
Waste emplacement resumed at WIPP in early 2017, following a nearly three-year break forced by a February 2014 radiation release in the underground disposal area. Since then, WIPP has taken shipments from the Idaho National Laboratory, Waste Control Specialists in Texas, Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, Shrader said.
Since reopening, the disposal facility has received 371 shipments through the first week of September, according to the latest publicly available data. The site last received a shipment from Argonne in 2013, and has received nine shipments from the lab since 2003.
Although the Energy Department typically doesn’t reveal exact timelines for shipments, it anticipates taking five shipments from Argonne by mid-2019, based upon projections provided to local governments along the waste travel routes.
The shipments anticipated from Argonne this fall will carry the more radioactive remote-handled waste packed in a “shielded container,” a DOE spokesperson said by email Thursday. “For this fall’s campaign all waste is remote handled prior to packaging but contact handled once received at WIPP due to the shielded container.”
The shipments WIPP has received since reopening have been contact-handled material, which has a surface radiation dose of less than 200 millirem per hour, while remote-handled waste is 200 millirem or more.
Argonne has been working with DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office and WIPP contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership to deploy new shielded containers, Argonne spokesman Christopher Kramer said by email. The containers provide a “shielded overpack for type A carbon steel drums that will be shipped to WIPP in the HALFPACT, according to Transportation Department requirements,” he said.
The incremental resumption of disposal of remote-handled waste at WIPP allows DOE to get started on another waste stream that WIPP has not received since before 2014, according to the Energy Department. About 95 percent of the roughly 45,000 cubic meters of TRU waste at DOE generator sites at the end of 2017 was contact-handled with the rest being remote-handled.
Construction is expected to start on WIPP’s new ventilation system by the end of the year, with completion anticipated in 2021. The upgrade will eventually allow increased emplacement of both types of waste.
Argonne’s contact-handled waste includes various solids generated from the lab and its maintenance operations. The remote-handled waste consists of debris from both research and development and hot cell facility maintenance and operations.
The Argonne National Laboratory is a pioneer in nuclear reactor research, dating to 1942 when a team led by Enrico Fermi produced the world’s first sustained nuclear chain reaction. The national laboratory remains active in advance nuclear energy research.
