A presentation about the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) dropped at the last minute from the agenda of a Wednesday citizens meeting in Santa Fe, N.M., includes no mention that the underground transuranic waste facility will reopen in December, as the Energy Department has publicly pledged since February.
According to the WIPP recovery presentation that was to be briefed Thursday to the Northern New Mexico Citizens’ Advisory Board, the DOE official missing from the meeting was Herb Cruickshank, transuranic waste certification manager for DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office.
WIPP has been closed since an underground fire and subsequent, unrelated radiation release in February 2014. Cruickshank’s 12 slides, which were obtained by Weapons Complex Monitor, made no mention of when WIPP might reopen. On July 15, DOE acknowledged it could miss the December 2016 deadline it put in place as part of the WIPP Integrated Baseline the agency released in February. This baseline included 72 days of schedule margin; a critical safety document that was a major bottleneck for other restart activities was delivered 100 days late in May.
“The WIPP Update presentation was taken off the meeting agenda due to a personal conflict of the speaker,” a DOE spokesperson for the Carlsbad Field Office wrote in a Friday email. “The Department has provided regularly WIPP Updates to the Northern New Mexico Advisory Board since the 2014 incidents and will continue to do so as requested by the Board.”
Meanwhile, DOE Carlsbad said it has started preliminary preparations for the permanent ventilation system that, by some time next decade, would increase underground airflow in the mine to 540,000 cubic feet per minute. The new system involves a new filter building and exhaust shaft, and early work is focused on collecting samples of the ground through which the shaft will be sunk, DOE wrote in a Thursday press release announcing a feasibility study for the new ventilation system
“Data collected from the drilling/coring activity will provide information for the building design team on geologic support capacity, seismic design parameters and building foundation design requirements,” the press release reads.
Currently, airflow at WIPP is about 60,000 cubic feet per minute, which is too still for workers to resume waste disposal there. An interim ventilation system installed earlier this year, but not yet operational, would increase airflow to around 110,000 cubic feet per minute — enough for workers to dispose of about five waste shipments a week.
DOE has acknowledged the interim ventilation system, expected to be ready in April and now slated to come online in August, is far enough behind schedule that it is nearly pacing the entire WIPP’s reopening schedule. Other jobs DOE is watching closely are shoring up the mine’s walls and ceilings with new bolts and maintenance of WIPP’s fire suppression systems.
The permanent ventilation system is expected to cost between $270 million and $400 million. Once it is installed, workers at WIPP could dispose of about as many shipments a week as they did before the 2014 accidents that shut the mine down — 17 — while at the same time mining out more space in the nation’s only disposal facility for transuranic waste.
