The U.S. Energy Department expects the number of transuranic waste shipments to its Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., to increase by more than 50% between fiscal 2020 and fiscal 2023.
The agency anticipates it will receive about 400 shipments of defense-related TRU waste at the underground disposal site in fiscal 2020, which begins Oct. 1. The number will eventually swell to 616 shipments during fiscal 2023, according to a recent five-year strategic plan from DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, which oversees WIPP.
The Energy Department projections include 440 shipments for fiscal 2021. The total could then decrease to 364 in 2022, before making a big jump to 616 for both fiscal 2023 and 2024. The facility could need more downtime in fiscal 2022 to enable the completion and activation that year of a new underground ventilation system and multipurpose utility shaft.
By comparison, 278 shipments arrived at WIPP between Oct. 1, 2018, and Aug. 15 of this year, according to the latest publicly available data. The facility took in 310 shipments between Oct. 1, 2017, and Sept. 30, 2018, its first full fiscal year of operation after being offline for nearly three years following an underground vehicle fire and later radiation release in February 2014.
The facility received 770 shipments in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2013, the last full federal year before the accidents.
The projections are for “planning purposes only,” DOE said in the strategic plan.
The defense related TRU includes clothing, tools, rags, residues, debris, and soil from 22 generator sites that have shipped to WIPP since 1999. The material is contaminated with radioactive elements, mostly plutonium, beyond uranium.
The agency has tied its ability to increase salt mining, done to excavate new disposal panels, and waste emplacement to increased underground airflow and various other improvements to its aging infrastructure. The strategic plan does not appear to say anything about the amount of salt tonnage being removed.
When WIPP resumed taking shipments from other locations in April 2017 there were about 25,000 containers of TRU waste stored at generator sites across the complex, according to the document. Working through this backlog takes some time, partly because containers must meet the toughened WIPP acceptance criteria enacted in June 2016.
This pre-existing inventory of waste will account for most of the shipments to WIPP “over the next several years.” About half of the shipments from will come from Idaho National Laboratory, according to the plan. Most of the rest will come from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
There are also 113 drums of transuranic waste generated from Los Alamos that remain stranded at the Waste Control Specialists’ disposal site in Andrews County, Texas. It is feared some of the drums might be similar to the LANL drum that ruptured in the WIPP underground in February 2014, causing the radiation release.
This potentially combustible waste is “buried” currently at WCS’ federal waste disposal cell, said Todd Shrader, former DOE Carlsbad office manager and current principal deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Environmental Management, on Tuesday.
Following his presentation at the ExchangeMonitor’s RadWaste Summit, Shrader said the Los Alamos Environmental Management office is taking the lead on analyzing options for the stranded waste at WCS. “A number of different options are on the table,” including steps to making the waste safe for transport to WIPP or another government facility. “Last I heard they were working with Savannah River National Laboratory” for ways to test the waste for potential oxidizers, he added.
Oxidizers have the potential to heat up and combust inside a waste drum.
