The Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., received 54 shipments of defense-related transuranic waste during April, according to the disposal facility’s public website.
April marked the first full month of shipments since the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) ended an extended maintenance outage that kept the facility offline for February. Shipments only resumed March 15.
As usual, the Idaho National Laboratory continues to be the dominant shipper, sending 38 shipments to the underground salt mine in April. There were also eight from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico; seven from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and one from the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee.
April’s monthly shipment total was higher than the 47 recorded during April 2023.
Because of the long outage, WIPP’s total for the first third of 2024 is down some from the same four-month period in 2023. During the first four calendar months of 2024, WIPP took in 127 shipments, down from 146 shipments during the same period a year ago.
But the WIPP total for fiscal 2024, which began Oct. 1, 2023, is nearly equal to the pace set during the same seven months of fiscal 2023. There were 241 shipments between Oct. 1, 2023 and April, 30, 2024, only three less than the 244 recorded during the first seven months of fiscal 2023.
For months now, DOE and prime Bechtel’s Salado Isolation Mining Contractors have been commissioning the Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System, designed to triple the rate of airflow in the WIPP underground. The agency has said the new ventilation system should be operational in mid-year.
The system’s commissioning is 60% complete, a WIPP spokesperson said by email Thursday.