The Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., is taking a reduced number of waste shipments following a recently concluded maintenance outage that coincided with a national public health emergency.
The underground disposal facility for defense-related transuranic waste is accepting “limited shipping to support critical operations within the DOE complex while observing COVID-19 precautions through consultation with our stakeholders,” a DOE spokesperson said by email Tuesday. With the current COVID crisis, and governors issuing stay-home orders, facilities are moving less waste.
Current conditions allow for four or five shipments per week, the spokesman said. On a good week, the salt mine staff handles about twice that many.
The disposal site took two shipments last week, the spokesman said. The shipments have yet to be posted on WIPP’s publicly available database, which has a lag time of about two weeks.
Before last week, the previous waste emplacement was a Feb. 13 shipment from the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) that arrived four days before the maintenance outage began, according to the database.
The facility has received 36 shipments to date in 2020, including the two not yet listed on the database.
Due to the rapidly changing COVID-19 situation and its potential workforce disruptions, “shipments are being scheduled for just-in-time transport and emplacement allowing the facility to remain flexible and better adapt to changing conditions,” the spokesman said.
Given the fluid state of the pandemic, planning is occurring over a shorter time period. The facility does not want to schedule shipments too far into the future, at which time workers might not be readily available due to potential government actions, the representative said.
Site management announced via Twitter on Tuesday that all WIPP facilities are open. “Unless you are teleworking, report to your normal work location.” Roughly 1,000 people work at WIPP. Like other DOE nuclear sites, it is believed that most staffers are working remotely unless their jobs physically require them to be on-site.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant began its annual maintenance outage, in which workers perform upkeep chores not practical during normal operations, on Feb. 17. The outage ended March 16.
The facility is managed for DOE by Nuclear Waste Partnership, comprised of Amentum (the former AECOM Management Services business), BWX Technologies, and Orano. The joint venture has a 10-year, $2.4 billion contract that runs through September 2022.
