The pace of transuranic waste shipments to the U.S. Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico picked up after a slow start to 2019, although it is still seven shipments behind the 2018 tempo as of the end of August.
The underground salt mine site near the city of Carlsbad received 225 shipments during the first eight months of this year, according to WIPP’s publicly available database. Of those shipments, 182 came from the Idaho National Laboratory, 20 from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, 19 from the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, two from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, and two from Waste Control Specialists in Texas.
In 2018, WIPP received 232 shipments of transuranic waste through August.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant received 115 shipments of transuranic defense waste during the first five months of 2019, compared to 138 shipments in the same period of 2018. Officials at WIPP contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership attribute this year’s slow start to inclement winter weather and a longer-than-normal maintenance outage that stretched from January into the first week of February.
In February 2014 an underground radiation leak forced WIPP offline for about three years.
Since it resumed taking defense-related TRU from DOE generator sites in April 2017, WIPP received 682 shipments as of Sept. 11, the last date for which publicly data is available. The Idaho National Laboratory has been the top shipper throughout, with 500 as of Sept. 11.
In 2013, its last full year of operation prior to WIPP received 724 shipments. The Energy Department says WIPP won’t approach that waste disposal rate again until after a new ventilation system is installed around 2022. The new system will enable simultaneous salt mining, waste emplacement, and maintenance work, DOE says.
