Shipments of transuranic (TRU) waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., could resume from across the Department of Energy complex as soon as February, an official told members of a DOE-chartered citizens group Tuesday.
“TRU shipments are expected to resume in February of 2017,” Jeff Bentley, general engineer with the Energy Department’s Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina, said during a presentation to the SRS Citizens Advisory Board’s Waste Management Committee.
That is among the earliest, and most specific, public pronouncements about the resumption of transuranic waste disposal at WIPP. However, the date could still change, and DOE has not yet made official which sites will get to send their waste to WIPP first, an agency spokesperson said.
“We expect to begin receiving shipments in 2017 but the schedule and shipping queue has yet to be determined,” a DOE spokesperson at the Carlsbad Field Office said by email Thursday.
The spokesperson added that WIPP — shuttered since February 2014 after an accidental underground fire and subsequent, unrelated radiation release — “remains on track to resume waste emplacement operations in December of 2016.”
There was already some transuranic waste above ground at WIPP awaiting interment at the time of the accident. It has been there ever since, and will be the first cache of waste to go underground, once the mine reopens.
Before the 2014 accidents, WIPP received about 17 waste shipments a week. When the facility reopens, it will be accepting about five per week, Phil Breidenbach, president and project manager for WIPP prime Nuclear Waste Partnership, said at a March industry conference. Getting back to pre-accident throughput requires an expansive new permanent ventilation system, which is expected to cost between $270 million and $400 million and come online no earlier than 2021.
An NWP spokesperson deferred requests for comment to DOE.
