While it has been looking since the fourth quarter of 2017, the prime contractor for the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) has not yet hired a director of mining.
Nuclear Waste Partnership still hopes to find the right candidate in the near future, spokesman Donavan Mager said by telephone last week. Making the right selection is more important than filling the post quickly, he added.
Officials at the transuranic waste disposal site near Carlsbad, N.M., said in November they planned to have a mining director in place in early 2018. The new position would, among other things, oversee safety in salt removal that creates more disposal space in the mine.
Nuclear Waste Partnership was told by DOE to hire a chief mining officer as a priority last September when it received a three-year, $928 million extension to its DOE contract. The base five-year deal NWP signed in April 2012 was worth $1.3 billion. When it issued the contract extension, the Energy Department said NWP would add a mining chief as one of its key management personnel to focus on safety of the mine.
It was not entirely clear why the position is taking some time to fill. Mager said he couldn’t comment any further on the internal hiring process.
But one source with knowledge of the Carlsbad area in southeastern New Mexico suggested the remote location can sometimes prove a tough sell for the spouse and family of an employee who must relocate.
Since it resumed underground salt mining operations in January to clear out more waste disposal space, NWP has removed 8,700 tons of salt at WIPP, Mager said in a subsequent email on May 18. Completion of salt mining in Panel 8 is scheduled for 2020, before waste emplacement is finished in Panel 7.
The contractor will earn up to $7.30 in fees for each ton of salt it mines during fiscal 2018, up to a limit of roughly $402,000 or 55,000 tons, according to the performance evaluation and measurement plan established when its contract was extended.
Underground workers must mine more than 112,000 tons of salt before Panel 8 will be ready for waste emplacement, the Energy Department has said.
Assistant Secretary of Energy for Environmental Management Anne Marie White recently approved a new $288 million ventilation system for WIPP. The new system has been called crucial to resuming full waste disposal and salt mining operations because current airflow levels are not sufficient to support both operations simultaneously. The new ventilation system should to be completed by early 2021, DOE has said.
WIPP was offline for about three years following a February 2014 underground radiation release. Operations have resumed on a slow, incremental basis, DOE officials have said. Panel 8 mining operations had actually started in 2013, prior to the halt in operations the following year.
