The Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., received 36 shipments of transuranic waste during March, according to the latest publicly-available figures.
The DOE’s public website for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) shows 25 shipments arriving between March 1 and March 31 from the Idaho National Laboratory; four from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina; three from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico; two from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and two from Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.
So far, WIPP has received 30 or more shipments during each of the first three months of 2023 with a total of 99 shipments during the first quarter of the calendar year. By contrast, a year ago WIPP took in only 18 shipments at the underground disposal site during March and only 36 for the first quarter of 2022, according to the DOE website.
The current rate would place WIPP on the brink of DOE’s goal of emplacing 400 or more shipments during 2023, a milestone that would mark the disposal site’s busiest year since 2017 when it reopened after being offline for three years due to an underground radiation leak in February 2014. Since reopening, the best annual mark has been 311 in 2018.
Ken Harrawood, president and project manager for Bechtel’s Salado Isolation Mining Contractors, WIPP’s new prime contractor, has expressed confidence that his team will exceed 400 shipments this year.
The optimism is borne in part by the fact that underground works in November started disposing of waste in Panel 8, which replaced Panel 7, which was contaminated as a result of the 2014 accident. Being in a cleaner work area, employees no longer have to put on so much protective gear in order to do their jobs, WIPP managers have said.
