Transuranic waste shipments from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee early this month were still arriving at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant with elevated radiological readings that exceed the New Mexico disposal site’s waste acceptance criteria (WAC), the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board said in a July 6 report.
“Although there is no evidence that this is a significant nuclear safety hazard, compliance with the WAC is required by the WIPP safety basis,” according to the DNFSB.
The board in June first cited elevated levels of contamination on Oak Ridge waste shipments to WIPP, tied to decay of radium-226. Sources have described it as a problem that occurs occasionally.
An Energy Department spokesman said earlier this month that staff at the Transuranic Waste Processing Center at Oak Ridge would wipe down the outside of the containers and take other steps to prevent such contamination. The DOE disposal facility in New Mexico tightened its waste vetting following a February 2014 radiological release that forced WIPP offline for about three years.
Separately, the next WIPP Town Hall is scheduled for Thursday in Carlsbad. On the agenda are the Energy Department’s newly hired mining director for WIPP and the request to change the way New Mexico calculates underground waste volume at the site.
The Energy Department and WIPP’s prime contractor, Nuclear Waste Partnership, want to stop counting empty space between drums within canisters against the 175,565 cubic meter volume limit set by the WIPP Land Withdrawal Act.
Also, NWP announced in June the hiring of Pete Graham, a plant manager for US Silica in Berkeley Springs, W.Va., as the mining director at WIPP. Salt mining resumed in January for the first time since an underground radiation release in February 2014.
Energy Department Carlsbad Field Office Manager Todd Shrader and NWP President and Project Manager Bruce Covert will speak at the event. The meeting, which begins at 5:30 p.m. local time, will be webcast.
