The Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., had received 250 shipments of defense-related transuranic (TRU) waste in 2018, as of the end of September.
That figure, available from publicly accessible data, does not include a shipment from Area G of DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico.
The Energy Department and its LANL legacy cleanup contractor, Newport New Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos (N3B), said the Area G shipment left Los Alamos on Oct. 4 and reached WIPP that evening. However, the shipment has yet to show up in WIPP’s public waste database.
“This is the first of what will be regular shipments of waste from Area G, a LANL waste management area, in more than four years,” N3B manager for contact-handled TRU waste, Danny Nichols said in a press release.
The Oct. 4 shipment consists of pre-1999 legacy TRU waste from off-site source recovery program containers from the National Nuclear Security Administration’s work, a DOE spokesperson wrote in a Monday email.
The Oct. 4 shipment did not include the treated remediated nitrate salt drums that outgoing LANL management contractor Los Alamos National Security finished processing in late 2017, the spokesperson said. Those drums are part of the so-called general population of TRU waste containers at Area G, and will eventually be sent to WIPP as the shipment schedule permits, the spokesperson said.
As for the 250 waste shipments received by the end of September at WIPP, 192 of them came from the Idaho National Laboratory, 44 came from the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, 13 came from Waste Control Specialists in Texas, and 1 came from the Savannah River Site in Tennessee.
Based on 250 shipments in roughly 39 weeks, the WIPP disposal site has averaged taking in 6.4 shipments per week this calendar year.
WIPP resumed taking shipments from DOE generator sites in early 2017. It had been offline for about three years following a February 2014 underground radiation release linked to problem drums from Los Alamos.
