WC Monitor
1/15/2016
IN DOE
The Department of Energy on Dec. 23 officially selected its preferred alternative for a permanent ventilation system to be installed at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, the head of DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office (CBFO) said last week.
A total of 24 alternatives were considered as the department looks to return ventilation to levels provided prior to the February 2014 fire and radiation release that halted operations at the underground transuranic waste storage facility, CBFO Manager Todd Shrader said Thursday at a town hall meeting in Carlsbad. “The preferred alternative is a new exhaust shaft that is unfiltered for the mining operations and that circuit within the underground. And then also a new filter building that would go roughly where the filters are now … a fairly large building that would support upwards of a half-million [cubic feet per minute] of ventilation if needed for the facility,” Shrader said.
The selection last month was Critical Decision-1 in the process. A firm schedule and budget plan for installing the system would be included in Critical Decision-2, which is due in 12-18 months, Shrader said. However, he noted rough cost ranges for the two segments of the project: $189 million to $280 million for the filter ventilation segment and $81 million to $118 million for the new shaft and associated ventilation equipment.
Airflow within the WIPP mine over nearly two years has been about 60,000 cubic feet per minute, rather than the prior standard of 425,000 standard nonfiltered CFM, after it went into “filtration mode” because some segments of the facility were contaminated. The department plans early this year to finish installing and activate an interim system that would provide sufficient airflow to resume TRU waste emplacement operations, which is expected to happen by the end of 2016. The department says a planned separate supplemental ventilation system is not needed for waste operations, but would be required for further mining of the underground.
The head of a union representing cleanup workers at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, Ohio, joined Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) for President Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address on Jan. 12.
Herman Potter, president of United Steelworkers Local 689, drew the invitation for being “a friend and a steadfast partner in the fight to accelerate cleanup of the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant and save jobs at the American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, Ohio," Portman said in a Jan. 11 statement.
Local 689 represents some 1,400 workers at Portsmouth, a former uranium enrichment facility now undergoing decontamination and decommissioning. The Energy Department expects cleanup work there to continue through the 2040s. Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth — a partnership of Irving, Texas-based Fluor and Lynchburg, Va.-based BWX Technologies — is DOE’s prime contractor on the cleanup. The company had prepared to lay off hundreds of workers from the Portsmouth project last fall due to a funding shortfall from DOE; the congressional omnibus budget for fiscal 2016 provided sufficient funding to avoid the layoffs.
Workers represented by Local 689 are also employed at the American Centrifuge Project in Piketon, which DOE has decided to close this year. The facility is the only U.S.-designed-and-built uranium enrichment plant in operation domestically.
