The Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico has received 118 shipments of transuranic waste since reopening to shipments in April, officials said Wednesday night at the WIPP Town Hall in Carlsbad.
WIPP is now averaging between five and six shipments per week from other DOE sites, according to Bruce Covert, president and project manager for site prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership.
Of the first 113 shipments that are posted on the public WIPP website, 74 originated at the Idaho National Laboratory; 16 came from the private Waste Control Specialists site in Texas, which is storing containers that originated at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico; 13 came from the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee; nine came from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina; and one came directly from LANL, which recently resumed shipments to WIPP.
However, the facility will suspend waste empanelment for two weeks next month for a maintenance outage. Among other things, WIPP workers will conduct electrical work that requires power interruption. The outage should start around Jan. 15, according to slides offered during the presentation.
Salt mining in the underground facility should also resume next week to clear out more space in disposal Panel 8, officials added at the webcast event. WIPP envisions removing roughly 112,000 tons of salt from Panel 8 over the next few years in order to create space for future emplacement.
The start “is a big deal for WIPP,” Covert told the audience. Salt mining has not occurred since two accidents forced the underground facility offline in February 2014. WIPP is the nation’s only site for underground TRU waste disposal.
As it has done with resumption of waste shipments, WIPP will take a steady, incremental approach to restarting mining, Covert said: “We are going to walk before we run.” The NWP official did not mention any specific mining targets.
A return to full-scale, simultaneous salt mining and waste empanelment is intertwined with WIPP’s planned construction of a new underground permanent ventilation system.
A request for proposals for construction of a major part of the ventilation system could be issued in January, said WIPP Federal Project Director Ronald Gill. Based on the slides, it appears that the upcoming RFP will be for construction of the Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System – including the New Filter Building and the Salt Reduction Building.
A construction pre-bid meeting with potential contractors is scheduled for Jan. 9 and the contract could be awarded in March, Gill said. Still to come will be another procurement for the Exhaust Shaft, Gill indicated.
“How do we get more air in the underground” is a vital issue, said Carlsbad Field Office Manager Todd Shrader. A supplemental ventilation system is being set up in the short term. All tests have been completed and WIPP has received DOE approval to run the supplemental ventilation system, officials said.
The proposed permanent system would provide 540,000 actual cubic feet per minute of air and should be operational in 2022, Shrader said.
That would mark a higher level of air flow than was present in the WIPP underground prior to a pair of February 2014 accidents that forced WIPP offline until 2017.
