Construction costs for a new ventilation system at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant could be up to $450 million, pending a recalculation, a Department of Energy official said Monday.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant’s (WIPP) planned Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System (SSCVS) “has a cost range of $400 million up to $450 million,” Janelle Armijo, federal projects director at the DOE’s Carlsbad field office, said during a session of this week’s Waste Management Symposium.
However, that projection could change “due to a rebaseline that is currently underway,” Armijo said.
This cost recalculation comes after the project’s prime contractor fired a subcontractor that had previously been working on the utility shaft that will be a key part of the ventilation system.
In the agency’s environmental management budget request for fiscal year 2021, it estimated that it would need just under $288 million for the project. That’s consistent with the projected cost DOE reported when it awarded the initial contract for the ventilation system in 2018.
The ventilation system, which would increase airflow in the Pilot Plant’s underground salt mine from 170,000 cubic feet per minute to 540,000 cubic feet per minute, is crucial to restoring WIPP’s waste-disposal cadence to the levels it regularly achieved before 2014, when an underground radiation release shut down the only deep-underground transuranic waste repository in the DOE complex for about three years.
